Clarion:Part 2-Hillside
by MostDismalFeldsparkle
Summary: September 2155: Another call across the dark. War looms.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** **I don't own Star Trek, Enterprise, its characters, or settings. These things are the property of Paramount/CBS, and are not my intellectual property. There is no financial gain made from this nor will any be sought. This is for entertainment purposes only.**

 **This is part 2 of the Clarion series. Need you read Part 1 first? Not really...? I mean, you likely won'e get the full context, but if you feel like you could roll with that, then you probably could.**

 **Other notes: It is a different type of story to the first part, purposefully less suspenseful, a little darker. It isn't nice. Damaged people act like damaged people. You may find this out of character at times. It also takes certain liberties with a Canon Season 3 episode. If all that is not your thing, then this may not be your thing.**

 **September 2155**

Although he had already checked, and checked again, Jonathan Archer once more lined up the reports. "Malcolm's, Travis's, Medical, Operations, Comms..." He juggled the PADDs into alphabetical order by name, then by department, and then by date, holding them between his fingers. He even lined up the edges against his desk, this last procrastination being especially pointless; the reports would, of course, be sent to Kreetassa via subspace.

As all involved, Jon included, had fatalistically expected, diplomatic relations with Kreetassa, from the start strained and diaphanous, had corroded dramatically in the wake of the _Treleishkah_ affair. All the Coalition worlds were on edge, as a consequence of the beacon technology every subspace transmission carried the threat of death, of the loss of self. However, _Treleishkah_ overshadowed Kreetassa more so perhaps than even Earth. Seven of the nine lives lost - lost to a glorified ham radio and unlucky stars - had been theirs.

And so, the rounds of reports, the threatened inquests, the cold diplomatic rage. And so, the PADDs Jon held in his hands.

And these reports were, he thought grimly, the thing he was doing to avoid doing the OTHER thing. And anything was better than thinking about the goddamn Romulan Star Empire.

"It's the tedium, that's what they don't tell you about," Jon said to the sound of the opening door. "You think it's going to be all heroic adventuring, but what is it? Faster than light paperwork..." He'd been expecting T'Pol, but he saw it was Trip, which caused him to add. "... and to think. All of this could have been yours as well."

Trip smiled, "You can't put it off any longer, Jon."

"... and instead they gave her to that pompous, bloviating, arrogant..."

"And failing to make the announcement won't change that. Reality does not bend to your will, mighty flagship Captain though you are..."

"...but I don't _WANT_ to." Jon finished, his sense of irony finally catching up to his petulance.

Trip clapped him on the back. "Come on, you can do it. Up you get."

Jon sighed straightened his shoulders and stalked out onto the bridge. Irritated as he was, he made a special point of making sure his expression was friendly before addressing Hoshi. "Open channels for a ship-wide announcement, please, Lieutenant."

Hoshi nodded back blandly, failing, as was now habitual to quite miss his eyes. She made a few adjustments to her board and then indicated he should speak.

Grimacing, Jon began. "Attention all hands, this is Captain Archer. It is my duty to announce that the NX-03 Resolute was launched today under the Captain Raymond Dorphin. Their first mission will be a diplomatic mission to the Tellarites regarding the new trade accord currently under negotiation. I am sure you will join me in acknowledging that this is a… thing which has happened... Archer out."

A junior crewmember clapped uncertainly a few times, then stopped. Somebody, probably Malcolm, snorted quietly.

"Very good, Jon. Great job!" Trip said, his expression hidden by his hands.

Scowling, _choosing to scowl_ , because a scowl is more dynamic than despair, Jon marched back into his ready room.

* * *

Phlox stared quizzically at the breakfast with which Liz Cutler had presented him; It was her custom to do this when apologising for something. The something was usually a small matter to which he himself had given little thought, however he could typically at least identify what the something had been. This time he was flummoxed.

"And to what do I owe this lovely gesture?" he asked her. The pancakes were less geometric than the ones which chef and his staff prepared and in truth he did not particularly enjoy the flavour. It was a family recipe of hers, he knew, and she tended to add rather a lot of sodium bicarbonate, for texture, he understood. She was unaware of the effect which this had on the Denobulan palate. But he found he always wished to eat them in any case.

"It's a celebration" she said face lit with a smile. "Ta-da!"

The odd vocalisation was accompanied by the production of a PADD, and presumably referred in some way to its contents. He took it.

"Oh, my paper has been published," Phlox remarked pleased, if surprised. One was normally informed of final acceptance.

" _Our paper_ ," Liz said happily. "And before you complain to the journal, I intercepted the acceptance notification. For the surprise factor."

"A success, then, because I am indeed surprised," Phlox replied graciously.

"I've got entomology publications, of course, but this is my first medical one and I am delighted. Even if I am only second author."

" _Somebody_ has to be second," Phlox replied, tactfully. In truth, his contribution was far more worthy of first authorship.

"We could have gone alphabetically..."

"But whose alphabet?" Phlox replied, finding with some satisfaction that the tables and figures had all been formatted correctly.

"I guess," Liz replied, stealing a blueberry garnishing his pancakes. She then glanced to the door. "Commander T'Pol's here. I'll leave you to it, shall I?"

"Thank you for the pancakes, Elizabeth. I will attempt to return to them before they chill."

Liz nodded to the Commander T'Pol as she passed, raising her eyebrows when she was not acknowledged, but continuing her departure regardless.

"You wanted to see me, Doctor?" T'Pol asked at the sound of the closing door.

Phlox indicated that she should sit, taking the time to rally his professional demeanour around himself. He was no stranger to giving bad news, not even to giving bad news to this woman, but it was not the sort of thing that one truly grew used to. More than that, T'Pol's Vulcan emotional armour and been sorely dented by the barrages of her recent past.

And, worse, that dented, delicate shell was being recast brittly anew by her reforming religion and her poorly negotiated liaison with the Chief Engineer. To Phlox's mind they were inadequate to the task, this new faith and new entanglement, and he was about to make things no easier for her.

"The discomfort is lesser than it was yesterday," T'Pol replied in response to his first enquiry and a short silence followed.

Phlox watched her closely, trying to judge if she was ready, but, faced only with her faultless mask, he pressed on, regardless. "The scans suggest the pain is originating from your nervous system. While the scans suggest that your peripheral nerves have healed well, in the meantime, your central nervous system has become unusually sensitised. Noxious stimulae now HURT more than they should and sensations which should not hurt now do."

T'Pol nodded. "Go on, Doctor. Please"

"The situation has, of course, likely arisen following your injuries on _Treleishkah_. This sort of response is a known side effect from such severe injuries. Damaged peripheral nerves stimulate the spinal cord and brain with abnormal signals over a long period of time and long term changes occur in the brain as a result. Knowing this, we instituted a treatment plan, one which is normally very effective, to stop this from happening. Unfortunately, your brain did not respond to this treatment."

The mask did not falter. "Because of the Trellium-D?" she asked flatly.

"Maybe. I can't be certain." Phlox said quickly.

"But that is your suspicion?"

Phlox shifted unhappily. "We may never be certain. I don't think it matters. The point is that there are treatments, things we can try, to solve this problem and to make you more comfortable in the meantime."

"But these treatments may also be ineffective?"

"We won't give up. I won't give up." Phlox said firmly.

Slowly, T'Pol nodded. "Thank you, Doctor. I am sure that you won't."

As the meeting seemed to have reached its conclusion, she rose as if to go. Then abruptly, she sat down again. If this was from turmoil, regret, or grief, she gave no outward sign, but as the seconds of silence ticked on, neither did she move nor invent a pretext for her stillness.

Phlox rose in concern, moved by how alone she suddenly appeared, asked if he could get her anything. If he could _call anybody_.

"No, thank you, doctor. I only need a moment."

He thought this might be a lie. It wasn't _a moment_ that she needed.

* * *

"Any progress?"

"Crivens, Malcolm! Why d'ye insist on sneaking up on people?" Alice exclaimed while coughing and mopped up the spill from her poorly timed sip of coffee. "I dinnae... _Walk louder_ or somethin', will'ye?"

"Nobody else finds it a problem," he replied mildly. "It's just you. And did you just say ' _crivens_ '? Should I expect woad and tartan next?"

Alice punctuated her glare by throwing coffee soaked tissues into the waste recycler, one at a time. "Any progress, you ask? Progress, presumably, on the thing I have been telling you, for four months, is _impossible._ What you are in fact asking, is if it suddenly _has_ become possible? Since the last time you asked me? Which was, oh, about sixteen hours ago?' "

On a mission, Malcolm held his expression steady. "Well, has it?"

"I don't know what you expect from me, I don't!" She threw up her hands, then folded her arms across her chest.

 _Defensive_ , Malcolm thought. Then he realised he was doing the same himself.

"Alice, nine people died, including two of our own, and we were not very far away from losing the ship. A collective shrug from the medical department is not an acceptable answer. We need some sort of way to know if people have been infected. Before it happens again. I shouldn't need to tell you how important this is… I mean, _you were there_."

Alice sighed. "Malcolm, your tenacious, if somewhat caustic, rhetoric on the topic has more than convinced me that it's incredibly _important_. What I am not willing to concede is that it is _possible_. You do understand the difference? Shall I prepare a Venn Diagram?"

"I need you to do better." He did. He had hit a dead end himself. They were still hopelessly exposed.

"Just out of curiosity, how regularly do you give Phlox these speeches? Because, I think he got them quite this regularly, I would spend more of my time hearing _him_ complain about _you_."

"Not as often, it's true," Malcolm shrugged and sat down, allowing himself a small smile. "Believe it or not, _you_ are the cooperative one."

"Well, obviously _that_ needs to change immediately."

He chuckled, but it was mirthless. For show. These days, feeling at ease was like a half-remembered dream. He wondered how anyone managed it. "You must have some ideas..."

Alice sighed heavily. "Well, that movie from the other night did set me thinking. We don't have a body of water to throw suspected witches into. But, maybe we COULD build a big set of scales? Then, all we need is to get a duck from somewhere..."

"Why won't you take this seriously?" Malcolm snapped, although he almost immediately lifting a hand in a small apology.

Alice set down her coffee. "I _AM_ taking it seriously. I answered you _seriously_ the first four hundred times. The problem is that you aren't taking _me_ seriously, when I tell you that it can't be done."

"Why not?"

"Out of the only two people you could tell me were definitely affected, one was dead, and the other had a concussion, and several recent seizures, and a brain scarred by _COMPLETELY UNRELATED_ mind-control parasites. So that left you, and a few other traumatised and injured people. _Maybe_. We just didn't get enough data."

Malcolm was too tired to be quite fair. "Well, why didn't you collect more?"

"Are you being serious right now?" Alice replied incredulously. "Why didn't I? Because, at the time, I had, a stabbing patient- the Captain of the bleeding ship no less-, a crush injury patient- the first officer-, the aforementioned concussion, a traumatic blinding, Travis's injured hand, Trip's collar bone, two human autopsies, seven Kreetassan autopsies, I had an infection myself, and, oh, _IT WAS MY FIRST WEEK_."

"It was your _second_ week by then."

"Malcolm, I swear to god…"

"If you need more data, maybe try doing some more tests now? I think I am probably willing to conclude that Travis and Captain Archer were affected after all."

"More tests?" Alice asked raising her eyebrows. "Like what?"

Malcolm shrugged. "Well, I don't know; that's your department. A brain biopsy?"

"A brain biopsy? Great idea! You first, though. Any part of your brain you aren't particularly attached to?"

"I did only mean a small biopsy."

"You're still going first."

"There must be something." Malcolm rubbed his face with his hands and then found it difficult to raise his head again.

Alice's voice was gentle. "We have the subspace filtering algorithm. It's been rolled out to all our allies, and there haven't been any further incidents. Maybe, the filter works. _Threat neutralised_."

Malcolm shook his head. "Why would the Romulans bother with a technology which can be countered so easily? What would be the point?"

"You said it yourself, months ago. The _fear_. Half the damn quadrant is terrified of this thing. Also, it's jammed up communications, because every transmission gets pored over before anyone listens to it. And last, but not least, it's gotten a full four months of Ahab-ing out of you. That's four months you could have spent on your EM barrier."

Malcolm smiled in spite of himself. "You love that thing, don't you?"

"Yes!" Alice replied, beaming. "I want a million of them. Sterile fields, safer patient restraint, quarantine applications, less traumatic tissue retraction..."

"Indeed. There may even be one or two non-medical applications."

"Aye, probably. But I don't care so much about those."

* * *

"I take it, Jonathan, from your announcement earlier, that you are not fond of Captain Dorphin?" Phlox asked between forkfuls of linguine. For the past few months Jon had been consistently inviting fourth wheels to his dining room and Phlox was the most reliable at accepting.

"You could say that," Trip interjected, flippantly.

"No, I'm not" Archer confirmed, then shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "It wasn't THAT obvious, though, was it?"

Even T'Pol refused to meet his eyes.

"Indeed it was," Phlox replied cheerfully. "Your announcement this morning was most peculiar. May I ask what prompted such faint praise?"

T'Pol cleared her throat. "Actually Captain, I was curious myself."

Jon sighed, looking at Trip for help, "Well..."

"He's an ass," Trip said helpfully. T'Pol arched an eyebrow.

"It's true," Jon said. "He is, in fact, an ass. Raymond Dorphin is... not a good leader of men."

T'Pol's lips pursed slightly. "Or of women, presumably?"

At this, Trip laughed into his beer glass. "Oh, he's an even _WORSE_ leader of women."

Phlox blinked in surprise. "That's...disappointing... in this day and age".

"It's trouble, is what it is..." Jonathan muttered. "...If _Resolute_ can go even six months without some sort of disaster - or scandal - I'll be very surprised."

Trip, suddenly morose, nodded in agreement. "This would never have happened, with Forrest around. He had Dorphin's number. Who's the first officer, by the way..?"

"Well..." Jon hesitated.

"Who?" Trip insisted.

"Kelby."

The only sound was Phlox's fork scraping against his plate. Then T'Pol smoothly enquired if there was any news about the Tellarite trade accord.

"It's slow going, given we don't know why the last one broke down," Jon answered gratefully. "They are still burying Starfleet in paperwork. There's more for us too, actually. Your department, actually, Phlox, although what medical data has to do with trade accords I'll never guess."

Phlox sighed. "Very well. Although I must say we've only just finished with the _Treleishkah_ reporting to the Kreetassans. They had very detailed requirements. It took months."

"Did all that work personally, did you?" Jon asked, lightly.

Phlox frowned. "Not personally no. But while my medical staff are working for the Kreetassans they are not working for me. Sometimes it feels like I'll never get my latest manuscript finished."

Jon smiled sympathetically and waved the steward over and turned to his dining companions.

"So, coffee with dessert?"

* * *

The problem was, he was _everywhere_ .

Fabrecia straightened her back and tried not to look. This was not the first time they had broken up, but it would be the last. And she would not look at him.

Unless…

"Hey Bree!"

 _Damn!_

"Good day, sir" she said coolly, staring just past his left ear.

Travis smiled winningly, "Don't be like that. I'm sorry."

"Don't be like _WHAT_? Professional?"

"Cold. I am sorry. I don't know why I said it. It's not true. I _LIKE_ that you are nothing like her," he said, sounding sincere. Remorseful.

 _Damn._

"I don't want to talk to you about your ex. You can't break up with me _AND_ talk to me about your ex. You may do a maximum of ONE of those two things," Fabrecia pouted, dismayed she was already relenting.

And he'd noticed. He pushed gently in front of her in the line, ignoring the various grumbling from behind them.

"I don't really want to do either. How about I come around, later? I wrote a song about you, I want to play it for you." He reached out and gently stroked her cheek.

 _Damn!_

"I have my pride, you know," she grumbled, knowing it was useless, she was won over. She knew herself. She may have pride, but she had no stamina for self-deprivation.

"Your place," she insisted, in a final, desperate sap to her dignity. It was a bigger thing to ask than it seemed. They had always used her room.

And, he was, she saw a little nonplussed. She had gained the upper hand, even if it was in an excruciatingly humiliating way. Leveraging his shame about them. About _her_.

"O…Okay."

She grabbed the nearest plate. It was roast beef, which she loathed, but she was committed now.

"See you then, then" she said firmly and stared until he turned away.

* * *

The door slid open and she peered out blearily, matted orange hair framing a distinctly chilly expression.

"Hi," Trip said chirpily.

"Is someone bleeding into their brain...?" Alice asked darkly, eyes flicking between Trip and Jon, who was lurking behind him, avoiding eye-contact.

"No..." Trip answered, still chipper. Jon was letting him handle this.

"Broken neck, then?"

"No, we ran out of booze," Trip answered, smiling winningly.

Jon cringed. The quality of this idea was plunging in his estimation with every moment. Also, the corridor was weirdly bright.

Alice's eyes narrowed. "You ran out of booze?"

"Yeah, thanks," Trip said.

Alice disappeared for a moment and grumbling returned holding out a bottle of scotch. "There. Now, be gone."

"Aren't you being a little insubordinate?" Trip said eyeing the bottle appreciatively. "He's the Captain, you know."

" _Insubordinate_? It's one in the morning, and you're here mooching scotch!"

" _Superior officers_ mooching scotch"

"Get away from me," Alice said, but returned Trip's smile in spite of herself.

"You mean, _'Get away from me, sir'_." Trip took the scotch and immediately handing it to Jon.

"Aye, I do mean that. _Goodnight_!" The door closed abruptly.

Jon surveyed the bottle of scotch, admiring the rich colour. "This stuff can't be cheap. How much do you think she brought with her?" They started walking back in the direction of Jon's quarters.

"I dunno. Wish I knew how she got it all aboard though," Trip mused. "There must be a pretty flagrant hole in our security somewhere."

This prospect made Jon feel quite a bit less buoyant. Back in his quarters, he hunted down a pair of glasses while Trip flopped lazily in a chair.

"To Dorphin and Kelby and the _Resolute_!" Trip toasted, laconically, when the both had a glass. Jon sipped his scotch, felt himself warm. It really was good. When he was bored with the silence he decided to needle Trip

"Won't T'Pol be mad? You said at dinner she'd see you later. I don't think she meant _THIS_ late."

"I'm not at her beck and call," Trip grumbled moodily.

"Well, we both know _THAT'S_ not true..."

Trip glared at him. "I'm not, you know. It's not like that. I'm not sure what it _is_ like, but it's not _that_."

"It's something..." Jon pressed, but felt a little guilty for doing so. Trip was a couple of beers ahead of him, after all. He was not being very sporting.

Trip struggled for words. "It's _maddening_ , is what it is. Outrageous and messy and full of...stuff. She's just... 90% of the time I feel like a complete idiot."

Jon smiled broadly, "Sounds about right".

Trip's eyes narrowed. "If you're going to be like that, I'll go."

"Then go," Jon smirked. "You already got me the scotch, what do I need you for?"

"Optics, of course. If I go, you're just a sad old man, drinking alone."

Jon nodded sagely. "Good point. Have another drink."

* * *

Hoshi pulled herself out of bed reluctantly and pulled on some clothes from the floor. She didn't want to go to sickbay, even slightly, but going to work would be impossible today. Sickbay was the only other option. Forcing herself into her small bathroom she splashed water on her face and despairingly inspected her hair. Her hairbrush wasn't where it should be. If she went to sickbay without brushing her hair, then she would be bullied back onto a higher dose of that awful medication. But if she _didn't_ go to sickbay, she would have to go to work. And if she went to work without brushing her hair, then people would _tut_ , and she would be sent to sickbay. And work was impossible today, anyway. She'd known it from the first moment she'd opened her eyes. Today, she could no more work than she could fly.

But her hairbrush was missing. And so she cried. She cried awful, ugly tears and hated herself more with every sob. A pathetic creature, utterly stymied by a lost hairbrush. _Hateful._

Furious, she pulled yesterday's hair elastic out from among her matted hair, pulling more than a few strands from her scalp. She smoothed her hair as best she could with her still-wet fingers, ripped the broken hair from the elastic and replaced it. Maybe if she put on a cleaner shirt, the hair would be forgiven. She even had one. One last clean shirt. She had managed laundry earlier in the week.

She walked to sickbay in her last clean shirt, hoping she would not see anyone she knew well. She'd also hoped she'd get the doctor that she hadn't nearly blinded, but alas, it was Phlox who greeted her.

"I can't work today. I have a headache" she said in reply. It wasn't a lie, she did have a headache, but Phlox was not deceived.

"Why can't you work today?" he asked

Hoshi stared at the floor, refused to answer, refused to look at him properly. She couldn't.

Phlox sighed, sat down next to her.

"Hoshi, maybe we should increase your dosage..."

"No."

"But..." Phlox began carefully.

"NO! You said three months and it's been _FIVE_ months."

"Hoshi, what I said was that after three months we could TRY to taper off the dose and see how you coped. I do not believe that it has been a success."

"I'm fine," Hoshi insisted, stubbornly, uselessly, tears stinging her eyes.

"You are not. You need help, and I wish you would allow me to give it to you," Phlox replied patiently.

"Why?" Hoshi demanded. "I nearly killed you. I nearly killed EVERYBODY. I shouldn't be here, anymore."

To Hoshi's great surprise, Phlox gently took her hand. The shock of it drew her eyes to his face and his expression, which was so kind, stabbed at her mercilessly.

"You know, Hoshi. I never really told anyone but I almost left Enterprise when we returned to Earth after the Treleishkah affair."

This was another surprise, Hoshi blinked in shock.

Phlox continued quickly. "It was something the Captain said that made me stay, but I think you are the reason I am most glad I made that decision. Well, one of two anyway. I think, if I had left then, you might have never forgiven yourself. Seeing you struggling now, makes me so glad I didn't, inadvertently, make it worse."

Phlox squeezed her hand, looked at her searchingly. She looked back into his eyes. His surgeon had done masterful work.

"Try increasing the medication again, Hoshi. If you really can't live with the side effects, we can try a different one. A few even, but you need it. You don't deserve to feel like this"

This was old ground. "Fine, if that's what it will take. But I CAN'T go to work today," Hoshi replied.

"Alright," Phlox sounded uncertain, but he did relieve her from duty, and began talking through her options. Hoshi escaped for her quarters as soon as she could.


	2. Chapter 2

"Happy Birthday !"

"Thank you?" Malcolm replied, pondering the object Alice had just placed in front of him. It was a very literal birthday present, with a card, wrapping paper, and ever-so-slightly-haphazard curling ribbon. He hadn't seen anything quite like it since attending birthday parties as a small child.

"You're very welcome," Alice replied mildly, scooping the pineapple out of her fruit salad onto Malcolm's plate, as she did on most mornings which they happened to end up in the messhall together. He'd stopped objecting months ago.

"Where is everybody this morning?" Alice asked looking around.

"I'm not sure actually, I haven't seen...sorry, did you _make_ this?" Malcolm asked, studying the birthday card uncertainly.

Alice sipped her coffee. "No. There was a lovely little card shop on the last asteroid we passed. _Of course I made it_. How else does one get a birthday card in deep space?"

"The more traditional solution to that problem is to just not bother."

"Nonsense. Birthday cards are important. A birthday card saved my life once," she replied lightly.

Malcolm shook his head. "I don't even _want to know_ how that could be true."

"Good, because I don't know you nearly well enough to tell you that story."

"Now I _do_ want to know, but I'm not going to ask. What is this supposed to _be_ anyway?"

Alice ignored his last question, which was fine, because he was teasing her. The card depicted a stag standing on a bluff and had been executed moderately competently, although with an idiosyncratic mixture of mediums. "Ran out of ink," Alice explained mildly, between strawberries.

Setting aside the slightly disquieting card, Malcolm began unwrapping the present, clearly a book. If its age had not been apparent from its heft and texture, it would have been from the smell which greeted him as he unfolded the paper. The cover was a rich russet colour and the title made him laugh.

"Waverley. _Hilarious_." Without really meaning to, he imitates her accent.

"Oh, that was quite good," she said, smiling. "Somebody said you were terrible at accents, but that was good."

"Which ' _somebody_ '?"

"I probably shouldn't say..."

"So, Trip then," Malcolm guesses, knowing he was right before seeing it on her face. He made a mental note to revisit this particular impression at the next several opportunities. "Have you seen him this morning, by the way?"

Alice shook her head. "No. I wouldn't be offended though. I suspect he has quite the hangover this morning."

"Wasn't he with T'Pol last night?"

"Doubt it," Alice shrugged. "He was with the Captain Archer when I saw him, which was pretty late, and he was three sheets to the wind, and seeking to loosen another sheet."

"And did you enable him?"

"Yes. It was faster than an argument. I was tired, and I'm not a virtuous person."

Malcolm finished his breakfast with the pineapple then stood up, smiling. "I suppose I'd better go find him. Make sure he's on time, talk loudly in his presence, that sort of thing."

Alice nodded agreeably. "Say 'hi' for me."

* * *

It was important to set a good example, so Jon gamely pretended not to be hungover. He forced himself to walk as if he wasn't dizzy, sip his coffee as though the smell did not make his gorge rise, and brightly greet everybody at a normal volume even though it made his head pound mercilessly. He suspected that the pretense had not been terribly effective.

He arrived on the bridge only a few minutes late, but was still the last there. "Can I see you in my ready room, Lieutenant Mayweather?" he asked.

Travis nodded silently and moved walked over to the door, then stepped aside so Jon could go through first.

"You have the bridge, Commander." Jon breezed past the stupidity of handing the bridge back over to T'Pol having been on it for about twenty seconds. He lead Travis into his ready room, took a seat and indicated Travis should do the same.

Travis hunkered into his chair, watchful.

"How are you, Travis?" Jon asked, as the door slid closed.

"Fine, sir." he answered, guardedly.

Jon grappled for an elegant segue into the conversation he wanted to have. Inspiration failing him, he opted for sincerity. "Travis, I don't want you to worry about this latest round of reports. Starfleet cleared you of responsibility for Ensign Wendall's death and the Kreetassans aren't interested in that part of it. Those three doctors that died were a pretty big deal apparently, and the first officer was from one of their ancient houses or something. That's what they are so worked up about; they don't CARE about what happened on Enterprise. I think only Malcolm's report even mentions you by name and he didn't write anything that..."

"I know," Travis interrupted leadenly. "He showed it to me."

Jon cleared his throat. "... and while Wendall's autopsy report is included in the medical report, it's the same one Starfleet got, the one you've already seen and the way it's worded..."

"I know. Phlox told me."

Jon was worried about him. For one thing, he'd just admitted to his Captain that two of his friends had, at the very least, seriously bent proper protocol by discussing their submissions with him.

"Good, I was about to break the rules and show you myself, but it seems others have spared me the trouble." Jon responded firmly, shifted in his seat. The scar on his side, while barely visible, still twinged on occasion. "You did everything right, Travis."

"I know, sir."

"So right, in fact, that now that you have your well-deserved promotion, I want you to start taking on more command role responsibilities. From the first time I met you I thought you could rise right to the top, and I'm more convinced now than ever."

"Thank you, sir. That's very kind." These words sat for a while, neither party particularly satisfied, before Travis, in a slightly more convincing impression of himself added. "I won't let you down."

Jon paused for a moment, studying the withdrawn young man who he barely recognised as his formerly effervescent helmsman, wondering if he should say more, be more emphatic. Or just leave the kid alone. "Thanks Travis, that's all. Although, could you send Commander T'Pol in?"

T'Pol filed in shortly after Travis exited. She eyed him shrewdly. "What did your discussion with Lieutenant Mayweather concern?" she asked, perching elegantly on the edge of her seat.

"Paperwork."

After an unconvinced pause she dropped it. "You asked to see me, Captain?"

If T'Pol bore Jon any personal animus for detaining Trip until the early hours, she gave no indication of it, now. Still guilt percolated through him dyspeptically. But what was he to do? And however conflicted Trip was about the prospect of commanding for a living, the stratospheric career rise of Commander Kelby obviously stung. And T'Pol was, in more than one way, not the ideal person to offer commiserations. Really, Jon decided, he had done her a favour.

"I did Commander. I was wondering if you might have heard anything new about this potential Romulan threat."

T'Pol's brow furrowed. "Why would Starfleet inform me and not you of any such intelligence?"

"Heard anything from the Vulcans," Jon said patiently.

"I do not receive reports from..."

"Unofficially."

T'Pol raised an eyebrow, just slightly shook her head. "I don't..."

"Rumours, innuendo, anything!" Jon insisted, slightly less patiently.

A different person might have squirmed uncomfortably under his gaze. "I understand that elements of the Vulcan government are...concerned," she replied at last.

"About war?"

"About an ongoing threat of indeterminate nature. About an uptick in terrorist chatter within Coalition aligned systems. About increased activity among mercenary groups and organised crime."

His first officer was clearly uncomfortable and Jon was reluctant to press her. And yet, the utter, maddening, silence from Starfleet command left him with only a few options and he was reluctant to draw from the only other. Yet.

"And are things being done?" he asked.

She met his eyes squarely. "I am lead to understand things are being... _discussed_."

It was, evidently, all he would get. He nodded her dismissal and she rose to leave.

She had recovered most of the grace of movement she had had before being so badly injured on the damn _Treleishkah_. But, not quite all of it.

Jon wondered if that slight stiffness, that slightly skewed carriage, would be with her for good.

* * *

Trip slipped furtively, and with relief, into his small office.

"Hiding from someone, are we?"

The voice caused him to start, and his stomach to heave unpleasantly. "Jeez, Malcolm. Don't do that. And, yes. I'm hiding from T'Pol. I kinda, accidentally, stood her up, yesterday." He slid gratefully into the chair which Malcolm vacated, rubbing his eyes, then caught sight of the date on his terminal display. "Oh crap. Happy Birthday. I got you something, but I left it..."

"Later is fine. I'm due in the Armoury, anyway. Why did you 'kinda-accidentally' stand up T'Pol?"

Trip exhaled slowly. "Well, short answer...booze."

"Naturally. Long answer?"

Trip shrugged. "Yeah...that's where it gets complicated. It's just..." It was no good, so he gave up, letting his words dangle unfinished in the air. "I'm not usually this bad at this..."

"This bad at _what_ though?" Malcolm pressed.

" _Exactly_."

Malcolm snorted. "You aren't still drunk, are you?"

"No, rest easy _, Lieutenant_. I'm fit for duty. I _am_ sorry about this morning, though. Don't suppose Hoshi was there? Hope you didn't have breakfast alone on your birthday. I didn't forget your birthday, by the way. I forgot this was Tuesday. It's different."

"It's fine," Malcolm replied agreeably. "And no, I didn't have breakfast alone. Alice turned up eventually. She gave me a...thing."

"A _what_?"

"A gift. A book. And a card."

Trip frowned. "We're in the middle of nowhere. Where did she get a birthday card?"

"It's better not to ask these questions. And don't change the subject. Why didn't you meet T'Pol?"

Trip shifted, shooting pain through his head and around one of his eyes. "I got drunk with Jon."

Malcolm frowned. "Did something happen?"

"With Jon?"

"With _T'POL_. Did something happen with T'Pol which lead to you not meeting her last night?"

Malcolm was obviously annoyed, and perilously close to late, meaning Trip could end the conversation with one more evasion. He did so by shrugging dramatically and exaggerating the effects of his hangover.

"We aren't done talking about this," Malcolm said pointedly on his way out the door.

Trip picked up a report from his desk and tried to find a distance at which his eyes could focus.

* * *

Hoshi pushed lunch around her plate, only half listening to Travis chew over his most recent encounter with Fabrecia Boschmann. She had roused herself for lunch. It was part of her agreement with Phlox that she would not miss any meals.

"I mean it's manipulative, right?" Travis grumbled. " _Your_ quarters. She knows I don't like to do that."

"Why don't you want her in your quarters?" Hoshi answered. She was watching Phlox and Liz Cutler wittering in a corner, a raucous group of young crewmen laughing, a women in the food line blinking back tears.

"That's not the point!" Travis's voice was too loud, drawing Hoshi's eyes to his face.

She raised her eyebrows. "It's not? Are you sure? She shares a room and you don't, so it's hardly practical. How do you think that looks to her?"

Travis took the admonition placidly enough. "We missed you on the bridge today, Hosh."

"I increased my meds again this morning," she murmured avoiding his eyes. "I'll be coming back to work tomorrow, unless the dose slows me down too much. Like last time."

Travis put down his fork and gave her an adorably sincere look. "Hoshi, I think everyone would prefer you were a bit slower if it meant you were also a bit happier. You know we all love you, right?"

Expressed by just about anyone else, the sentiment would have angered her. But Travis was different. She took his hand. "Yeah, I do know."

"What are we...hi, Hoshi... what are we talking about?" The plates on Trip's tray rattled precariously as he set it down.

"Travis and Fabrecia," Hoshi replied steadily.

Trip smiled. "Ah, Travis, you've got to get your act together with that girl."

Travis's mouth twitched in annoyance. "Really. I get this. From _you_?"

Trip sighed, clearly vexed. "It's not the same thing, Travis. T'Pol is..."

Travis interrupted. "Nope. Sorry sir, but this is ridiculous. Stop talking to us about T'Pol. Stop talking to Malcolm about T'Pol. Stop talking to the Captain about T'Pol. You know who you should talk to about T'Pol?"

Trip's mouth twitched. "Chef?"

 _"T'POL!"_

The chatter in the messhall dropped slightly as those at the nearby tables pretended not to listen.

Trip pulled himself a little straighter. "Travis, I think you are projecting..."

"No," Travis's voice was growing uncomfortably loud and the circle of eavesdroppers was expanding. "No. I'm not _projecting_. I am trying to have a little casual sex with a pretty girl. Simple, fun, and in no way resembling the fucked-up operatic tragedy you two keep shoving in our collective faces."

 _"Excuse me?"_

The whole room seemed to plunge in volume and temperature.

Travis rose to his feet. "You heard me."

At this, Hoshi moved, but she would have been to slow.

Fortunately, Malcolm appeared and stepped between them. "Travis! There you are. I needed a word, err… _right away_ , in fact," he said briskly, while shooting Hoshi questioning glance.

She could only shrug helplessly.

* * *

Well, that certainly escalated quickly" Phlox remarked to Liz, as they watched Malcolm Reed all but manhandle Travis Mayweather toward whatever feeble pretext he'd devised.

"Hmmph," Liz grumbled, not really done with their previous topic of conversation. However, Phlox's consternation didn't immediately waver. "It's the fucking _Treleishkah_ again. Months later, and it's still ruining everything."

"What did that have to do with _Treleishkah_? It sounded like it was about Commander T'Pol?"

Liz sighed. "You were injured, too, by then, so you probably don't remember. Tucker kind of checked out for a little when Archer was stabbed, so Mayweather ended up having to go up to the bridge..."

"...where he was held hostage for several hours and ended up having to kill somebody," Phlox finished comprehendingly.

One corner of Liz's mouth pulled back in a frown. "Right. If you ask Tucker about it, he would say that he was taking vital steps to recover the away team and save the Captain's life…"

Phlox nodded cautiously. "I see…"

"…BUT, if you ask Mayweather, he would say HE was forced into trying to take command ship, and organising the search for Hoshi, while Tucker was dickering around with the transporter. And it all ended in disaster."

"And Travis resents Commander Tucker for this," Phlox said thoughtfully .

"Well, yes. I mean I'm sure if you asked Travis, he'd say he is fine with Tucker..."

"But, he's not." Phlox finished. "Perhaps we have been so focused on the medical fall-out for Commander T'Pol and the emotional fallout for Hoshi, that we have neglected Travis."

Liz nodded glumly and ate a few more bites of lunch. The mood in the messhall was now settling back to normal, apart from Trip and Hoshi sitting moodily at their table, Travis's unfinished meal cooling in front of them.

"He is quick to anger," Phlox continued. "And also, I have been lead to understand, erratic in his personal life."

Liz nodded. "If you mean the thing with Boschmann, then, yeah. I'm done even keeping track of _that_ mess."

"Some emotional upheaval is expected after what happened with Ensign Wendall. However, if it is starting to affect his personal relationships and he is regularly losing his temper at superior officers..."

"He's kept it all off-duty," Liz interrupted defensively.

"So far," Phlox qualified. "I believe I shall take steps to intervene, regardless. _Proportionate_ steps, I assure you."

Liz sighed. "Remember when the crew all got along, without all this interpersonal drama tearing us apart at the seams?"

"No," Phlox answered, curiously. "When was that?"


	3. Chapter 3

It happened at 1453 hours precisely.

Lieutenant Sato was absent, so it was Crewman Baird who saw it.

T'Pol was alerted immediately. Before he even spoke, she heard the sharp intake of breath and smelled the tinny scent of rising adrenaline. Still only mildly alarmed she rose from her chair. Her legs shrieked in protest, the nerves declaiming of damage long since scarred over. But when she saw Baird's console, the warning displayed there, even this pointless, irrational pain slipped from her attention.

"Sir?" Baird's voice was hoarse and scarcely audible, commanding no attention at all.

"What is it, Crewman?" T'Pol asked, playing her part. Her voice did rouse the Captain's attention; he lifted his head from whatever had been occupied, gazing toward them with polite interest.

Baird moistened his lips. "It's… Sir, we've had a positive identification. A signal, sir, a…. a _pulse_. It's activated the _Treleishkah_ Protocols."

Baird was talking to Archer, but T'Pol triangulated his gaze to the tactical station, or more precisely to the tactical officer. Without needing to look, T'Pol knew that Malcolm Reed had bolted out of his chair, and owned the rapidly approaching footfalls. Archer had a shorter distance to travel, but they arrived at Communications at almost the same moment.

"The Protocol's activated?" Archer asked tensely. "Somebody check."

T'Pol was best placed to do so; she had already, in fact, begun. "Confirmed, Captain. The Communications system has been isolated from the main computer," she replied. "Medical and Engineering systems have been firewalled and non-essential systems have been shut down."

"Full stop. Disable everything with a speaker," Archer replied. "Nothing comes in, except sub-light sensor readings and nothing goes out at all. Deactivate and password protect the communications array…"

"Already done, Captain," T'Pol replied. "I have checked the logs. Nothing was transmitted."

Archer nodded smartly. "Good. Baird, report to sickbay…"

"Sir, I didn't listen to…"

"Go anyway. And get Hoshi up here."

"Sir, she's…"

"Drag her out of bed if you have to," Archer interrupted sharply. "I need a positive ID, and she knows this thing better than anyone alive."

* * *

It was humiliating, being dragged from her bed. So humiliating in fact, that, propelled to the bridge by her irritation, Hoshi had herself convinced it was a false alarm. That Malcolm's overly paranoid protocol had flagged some quasar emission or gamma ray burst. Until she set eyes upon it and she bit down on a mewl that seemed to form in her very bones.

"That's it," she said dully to the hastily assembled officers. "It's been rarefied. But that's it."

"They aren't trying to hide it," Malcolm mused softly. "It's not piggy-backed on anything. It's not mixed in with anything. It's just pulsing out in to space."

Archer exhaled though his teeth. "From where? Can you tell?"

"The Epilson Legato system."

"That's near Romulan space?"

" _Very_ near."

A tense silence filled the room. "Well, someone say it," Archer prompted, through his teeth when it had gone on long enough. "Malcolm? You know you want to. And it is your birthday..."

Hoshi blinked at that. She'd forgotten.

"Very well. Obviously, it's a trap," Malcolm intoned to a silent chorus of nods.

Archer nodded as well. "Suggestions?"

Trip offered one. "Run away, very quickly. Big 'ole trap." From his tone, however, it was clear he knew, just as well as everyone else did, what was coming next.

"Except..." It was Malcolm, of course, and he barely needed to finish. "...we need the intel. Badly. We have to know what those things can do. We have to know we can counter them."

"Tasty lure," Trip agreed. "Shame about the big trap."

"Yes, I know it's probably a trap," Malcolm snapped. "I SAID it was probably a trap..."

"Probably?!"

Malcolm sighed. "What if it's _not_? It could be one of the beacons, but malfunctioning. It could be a defector trying to get our attention. I mean, for a ruse, it's not very sophisticated..."

Trip rolled his eyes. "Apparently, it doesn't need to be sophisticated if our Tactical Officer is ready to jump straight into it, anyway. Apparently, any sort of sophistication would be a gigantic waste of energy."

"Trip," Archer chided gently. "Malcolm has a point. We do need intel."

"I still vote no. Let's just confound expectations for once, and leave while we still can."

"I'm not suggesting we wonder up to whatever is there and ring the door bell," Malcolm replied. "A sensor sweep. We can isolate whatever computer we use, maybe use a shuttlepod, quarantine and isolate the personnel we use for some length of time..."

"…Fall into obvious trap, die horribly..."

"Okay. Anyone else got an opinion?" Archer interrupted. "T'Pol? Hoshi? Travis?"

"It seems very likely that the pulses are an attempt get our attention and to draw us to Epsilon Legato," T'Pol mused. "But it is unclear _why_. We cannot necessarily assume nefarious intent. Even by sending the pulses at all, they are giving us another opportunity to study the beacon technology; an opportunity which would not be necessary to lure us to a particular place. There would be multiple, more surreptitious and more certain ways to do so."

Archer nodded to his first officer, then turned. "Hoshi?"

"It could be a call to parley, maybe?" she suggested uncertainly. "Maybe an olive branch?"

Trip scoffed. "You can't be serious. Who the hell fires a lethal weapon at people as a peace offering?"

Hoshi shrugged. "Every time we have dealt with them, they have been covert. Cloaked mines, false-flag drone ships, the pulses concealed into a distress signal. Maybe the sheer blatantness of this is a positive sign. An open palm."

"Travis?" Archer prompted.

The helmsman shook his head. "Actually, I'm with Commander Tucker. If they want to parley or make peace they can damn well figure out a less terrifying way to ask. I say, we hightail it out of here."

Archer exhaled loudly, and the occupants of the room waited for his decision. Hoshi knew before he spoke, something about his stride, the almost imperceptible nod of his head, his gaze directed at the floor.

"At this stage I'm authorising sensor sweeps only. Find a way to connect the subspace sensor array to a completely isolated computer system. Daniel's quantum beacon as well, so we can scan for any of those cloaked mines. We minimise personnel interpreting the scans, nothing audio, and we abort at the slightest indication that something is wrong. Take every precaution. Understood?"

The assembled officers all nodded, but even those who had been in favour of investigating didn't look pleased.

* * *

Travis trapped his fingers in her curls, gently guided her in for a kiss, trying not to think about the implications of the fact he was doing it mostly to silence her for a moment. That he'd rather be somewhere else. Or _with_ someone else.

Refuse to answer, he thought. Make some entreaty towards the separation of the command and the personal. She's not _entitled_ to an answer.

They were in his quarters and he did not like it.

She was admittedly beautiful and a good person. Talented. Fun. But she didn't _belong_ in here.

He wanted her to leave, and a kiss only silences for so long

"So, what did he say?" she asked, after they pulled apart.

He stiffened, stomach knotting, and answers her after all. "I don't want to talk about it. I can't believe we are blindly chasing after this thing. Precautions, my ass. What use are precautions when we aren't even sure how the fucking thing works?"

His voice was sharp enough, that Fabrecia drew backward slightly. "Okay. Senior officer stuff. I understand."

Travis was sure she _didn't_ understand, because he could not understand himself. What was clear, though, was that he wasn't angry just because the decision hadn't gone his way. As childish as that would be, it was _worse_ than that.

Travis was angry because he had found himself on the same side as Tucker. And his disgust with himself for that sat alongside the anger. Twin leaden balls of rage in his gut.

When had he grown so unwilling to forgive a friend for a mistake? When so unwilling to forgive that he was all but spoiling for a fight in the mess hall? When so petty that this animus had almost caused him to speak against his better judgement when his Captain asked for it?

Probably about the same time when he's decided that he would like the talented, fun, witty woman in his bed more if she didn't talk so much.

Once, Travis had liked himself. Believed in his own goodness. Walked comfortably in his own integrity.

And then he had killed. Killed with his own hands and a shard of broken glass.

He was there. _Always there_. When he felt something sticky. When something was unexpectedly red, when light flinted off glass. Always sitting alone on the bridge with two corpses, one he'd killed, two he'd failed to save. Corpses which, in reality, had been long since cleaned and processed and sent back to Earth.

But that were also still _there_.

The words his friends had summoned later, 'Command potential', 'heroics' were paper thin. The blood seeped through.

Fabrecia was talking, he watched the shapes of her mouth, but did not listen to her words. He had caught the first few. "Are you okay? Where did you go? It wasn't..." This song is old between them. It has lost all meaning and is not pretty enough to listen to any more.

She is getting bored with it too, he sees. It's subtle, but weariness is growing around her eyes. She had taken on a task she was not fit for. She could not bring him back to himself, because she had never really known him.

Whatever had been between them was faltering, and neither her frantic words, nor caresses would rekindle it. Not without his help.

And _he_ didn't _care_.

* * *

Trip thinks it is, perhaps, the flicker of the candles, the scent of the exotic incense. Rare variation to the hermetically sealed, steadily illuminated environment. But whatever it is, stepping into her quarters is like stepping into another place. The candles, the scents and the company.

Things are easier here, too, between them. Not a lot, of course. They could never be truly easy anywhere.

Easy was long lost, never had.

But it is a little easier. And it is precious. He arrives with an apology on his lips and she takes it. And they are entwined in strange alien rhythms and transcendent.

"It's fatuous. Quixotic. We should walk away," Trip says, afterward. He means Epsilon legato and he knows she understands.

Because she is clever, and used to him by now, and because there is some other, subtle communication between them. It's alien and it ebbs and surges, and it remains.

They are bound.

"Oh?" T'Pol says. She raises her eyebrow and the end of the word just too late, and he notices. Hurt starts earlier, but pride moves faster. He has chosen to talk about the ship, chosen professionalism and distance. And it aches like the point of a finger pressed to her chest. He knows this, because he can feel it too.

 _Bound_.

Yet another thing he would never have chosen for himself. Why do these things keep happening?

"You believe my judgement is fatuous?" she speaks when he doesn't. He finds it so sexy, her carefully concealed anger. And that realisation makes him angry as well, how he begs for, and paws over, scraps of emotions. He is always hungry for her. Pounding on glass.

And the room is haunted

He sighs. "No. Not really. But I think we'll regret it."

She replies with an expressive look, then suddenly reaches out. Touches his arm. Pulls, leads, guides, him towards her again. There is curling smoke, lips, and skin.

* * *

He should have been somewhere else, anywhere else, really. But he was restless and the restlessness twisted around a nail in his gut. He felt like tearing at his own skin, or pressing himself against the walls until they swallowed him. The gym might have been a better choice, but the whole crew was tense, so others will be there, and he was beginning to make people nervous.

He had friends, but they were busy tonight. Consumed by their lovers, or by themselves. Just at this moment, there was no one else.

When the door opened, Alice looked vaguely surprised, as though she was expecting someone else. From the looks of her, she had been asleep, which surprised him for some reason he couldn't name.

"You've heard, presumably?" he asked. She did not exactly invite him in, but she did step back to make room as he moved forward.

"That we've detected a signal? Aye. And no. Still no diagnostic test. No vaccine. No therapy. I'm not holding out on you." At least she sounded apologetic about it this time.

"I know. That's not why I'm here. I couldn't sleep."

One corner of Alice's mouth curled. "Presumably, given that you came here, rather than sickbay, you would prefer the assistance rendered be more fermented than pharmaceutical?" She scooped up a mostly full bottle of scotch, the liquid sloshing pleasantly against the sides.

"Dealer's choice," he replied lightly, although she was already pouring.

" _Uisge beatha_." Alice held out the glass at what would be the correct height were he sitting down, which he took as an invitation.

" _Aqua vitae_ ," he said, taking it.

"That too."

Once he was sitting on the bed though, the first sip of scotch searing his throat, he ended up reclining into it, suddenly too exhausted to sit. He was too exhausted, as well, to feel much more than a twinge of embarrassment, when she sat down on the floor, next to her bunk, with her own perfunctorily sized nip of scotch. He'd expected she'd sit on her absent roommate's bed.

"Did I wake you?" he asked. "I'm sorry."

"It's alright. I only have to be nice to you for..." she craned her neck to see the chronometer, "...nine more minutes, and then it'll be tomorrow, and not your birthday, and I can kick you out."

"Suppose I'd better drink quickly then," he replied smiling. "I am sorry, though. I won't make a habit of it. I suppose it's just...I've been on tenterhooks for months, expecting something like this. And it's good in a way, because maybe we'll be able to get that data you and Phlox need. But now that it's here..."

"Aye. I get it. On your birthday too," she replied softly, then her eyes widened. "Oh hell. That's it isn't it? Somebody gave you a monkey's paw for your birthday, and you made a wish, and now we are hurtling towards the grim and ironic consequences."

Malcolm was too tired to tell if he was amused or irritated. "No. No monkey's paw. The prize for most unsettling gift still goes to your calamitous home-made birthday card."

Alice sighed. "Look. I've not been here long enough to absorb all of the cultural norms. I had no idea that significance attached to birthday cards. Where I come from, birthday cards are quite a normal thing to give people. And for what it's worth, I did give you a gag gift with it."

"Gag gift? That book is what, 300 years old? Subject matter notwithstanding, nothing that old counts as a gag gift..."

"I reckon a 300 year old lemon tart would qualify as a gag-gift...I'd gag, anyway..."

"Maybe you'd gag at first. But I'm pretty sure within a few minutes you'd be culturing it for interesting fungal spores."

"Well, when life gives you 300-year-old lemon tarts..."

Malcolm raised his eyebrows. "It's just your coping mechanism, isn't it? The god-awful jokes. It's how you deal with dread."

Alice nodded amicably. "Well, abusing pills is frowned upon, in my profession, and everybody already expects surgeons to think themselves hilarious and god's gift, so..."

"...So far be it from you, to subvert expectations?"

"Exactly. Subverting expectations is far too much work."

"Can I have another drink?"

Alice blinked at the chronometer again. "Seven minutes, so yes."

The sound of pouring was very loud in the quiet, half-lit room.

"Do you think we should go to Epsilon Legato?" It didn't feel to Malcolm like he was changing the subject. Perhaps he wasn't.

Alice answered without missing a beat. "Funny word, isn't it, _'should_ '? I think you're asking if I think it's _wise_ to go to Epsilon Legato, but it's not quite the right question, is it? The real question is not if it's wise, but if we can do otherwise. I think we _will_ go to Epsilon Legato."

"You are a cheap drunk, you know," Malcolm replied into the silence that followed. "You've barely touched that, and your nigh unintelligible."

Alice sighed. "I can hold my liquor fine, I'll have you know. In fact, I'll give you an opprobrious lecture on the subject. If you are still here in six minutes, that is."

"I'll be sure not to be."

"Good!"

* * *

Hoshi crawled into bed. Exhausted. Numb. Too hollow even for fear.

Was this the life she wanted?

She'd collected enough languages to study for the rest of her life. In her office in Brazil, with a window that showed sky as well as stars. She could be smelling the ghost of a storm in the air, the fragrant, sodden earth of the rainforest.

It was clear to her now, clear to them all, that the grand adventure was a lie.

Danger and war lurked darkly among the stars. Battles and blood.

She longed for clouds, for lightening. For _climate_.

For sand, mist, and rain.

She slept fitfully, snatched at by sepulchral dreams.


	4. Chapter 4

"I suppose I thought you would send somebody else."

Trip shrugged at Malcolm's surprised expression. "I may not agree with this plan, but if we're doing it, we're doing it, and I'm not asking anyone who works for me to do something I won't."

Malcolm rubbed his forehead with his fingers, apparently forgetting there was grease on them. They were crammed into an access tube, detaching the sensor array from the main computer in preparation for wiring it to a storage drive. A drive which could be connected to an air-gapped auxiliary computer, one with its networking ability physically stripped out.

People would be crawling in and out of the tight space to physically carry drives to computer and back again, so Malcolm, from the look of it had been dismantling a not-strictly-necessary cooling manifold which impinged upon the access tube, in order to make more room. Hence the grease.

"We agree on this more than you think we do," Malcolm murmured as Trip gestured the presence of the grease and passed him a rag.

"I expect so," Trip agreed. "I expect we just disagree about which one of us is being horribly naïve."

Malcolm smiled cheerlessly. "I don't know about that. I don't think you are _horribly naïve_. I don't buy Hoshi's open hand of peace theory. Not one bit. There's going to be a war. It's probably been inevitable since the drone ship. But people die for intelligence all the time in war. And a good portion of the time, history calls it good. There's nothing horrible about being naïve about that."

"Wouldn't say I _am_ naïve about that," Trip replied, looking at EPS conduits, rather than his friend. "Just would rather it wasn't us doing the dying. Particularly not for intelligence which the enemy is presumably happy to give us. Can't be all that useful if they are, Can it?"

"Sometimes, people don't realise what's useful. Sometimes, people sow the seeds of their own destruction. "

Trip chuckled. "Malcolm, I swear, you pick the strangest times to turn optimist. I'm sorry about yesterday, too. I dropped the ball on the birthday thing…"

"That's okay. You're busy."

"Ah, yes. We are both trapped in a small space for hours on end, so of course you'd bring up T'Pol. Can't help yourself. Surprised it took you this long."

"I never mentioned T'Pol," Malcolm replied easily. "However, if _you_ want to talk about it…"

"Very funny. Honestly, it's fine. I'm fine. _WE'RE_ fine. Stop hovering."

"Okay…" Malcolm paused just long enough for Trip to feel hopeful, then, "but it doesn't _SEEM_ fine. It seems…"

"What?"

"…fraught?"

Fraught. Trip sighed deeply, wondering how he could even respond to an accusation like _fraught_. Of course things were fucking fraught. How could they not be? How could things not be fraught with T'Pol when every aspect of their lives, their past, their present, conspired to…?

"It works better when we don't talk," Trip tried.

It's a weak gambit, however, and Malcolm refused to be scandalised. "I see, go on."

Trip rolled his eyes. "Agh. No _active listening_ crap, okay? Take 'mind your own business' for an answer! Tell you what, if your 'merrily-skip-into-the-dragon's-den' plan dooms us all, and we get the chance, I tell you all about it as we die. You can go to your well-deserved grave with your voyeurism satisfied, okay?"

"Alright. Deal."

"Remind me why we're friends, again?"

* * *

"There's something compellingly old school about all this, isn't there?" Alice mused, slightly couched over in deference to the low ceiling of junction F56-R. "Actually carrying information around in a little box."

"Please take this seriously," Malcolm found himself imploring.

Alice regarded him quizzically. "I promise I will do just as you tell me. To the letter."

The reply didn't satisfy Malcolm, although he could not quite figure out why. "Are you ready?"

"Aye, yes. Scanners all tuned to brain waves and set to record." She held up one and then the other. "Human. Vulcan."

"And they don't have speakers?" he confirmed.

"No, they've not grown speakers. Why would neuro-medical scanners need speakers, anyway? Although actually, it would be quite a good idea, wouldn't it? Audio vital sign read-outs for when there's a need to look elsewhere, increased accessibility for medical emergencies where there's low light, or should someone's vision be impaired in some way, or maybe..."

Malcolm closed his eyes. "Alice, could you concentrate, please?"

There was nothing for her to concentrate upon. They were waiting for T'Pol in a junction and the scanners were ready. But Alice must have taken his plea for what it really was, because she fell silent.

Until T'Pol arrived, Malcolm spent the time ruminating over the preparations, checking each for unexamined assumptions. Looking for that which he had missed. He felt no satisfaction upon finding nothing.

It was hard not to attach gravity to the sound of T'Pol's descent into the junction. Although there was no logical mechanism for how she might have been contaminated, simply by carrying a hard drive, and no way that such contamination could be transmitted by her footfalls on the ladder, his stomach clenched unpleasantly nonetheless.

"You should see what your amygdalae are doing right now," Alice observed lightly into the silence. "I'm taking additional baselines," she added defensively when he turned to glare at her.

"Stand where you can't see the computer's display," he replied sharply at about the same moment T'Pol descended into the junction. "If this thing can be transmitted visually now..."

"Aye, I know."

After confirming all was ready, T'Pol initiated the brief process of connecting the hard drive bearing the sensor readings to the computer. "I shall examine the scans visually for a few moments and then make further decisions based upon the cortical scan results," T'Pol announced when she was ready.

"It should be me," Malcolm replied, almost automatically.

Before T'Pol could reply, Alice spoke up. "Actually, Commander, I agree. We know that the beacon technology can affect humans; it's a little more _iffy_ whether you were ever affected. In this case, he actually does make a better canary."

At T'Pol's agreement, Malcolm switched on the computer. Code specifically amended to the BIOS automatically fed the data in the hard drive to the operating system which in turn fed it into sensor software. Once ensuring only he was positioned to see the screen, he keyed in the command to display the scans of Epsilon Legato, examined the data for a few seconds and then forced himself to look away.

 _Life-signs: 6._

It was the only thing which had stood out. A system empty of starships. A structure on a minor planet, at the exact location to which they had triangulated the pulse signal, and six life-signs.

But was the information going to send him on a homicidal spree? "Anything?" he asked tensely.

"No," Alice replied. "Just garden variety 'looking-at-and-thinking-about-things' brain readings. Given of course, a healthy respect for the potential deadliness of said things."

Malcolm felt no particular relief. He didn't feel any different, though.

With a blunt nod, T'Pol joined Malcolm in sight of the screen and they both examined the readings more thoroughly.

"No significant changes in your brain, Commander," Alice confirmed after a few seconds.

T'Pol nodded, surveying the readings. "No ships detected in the Epsilon Legato system, either by sensors or by Crewman Daniel's quantum beacon. No mines. The signal appears to originate from a structure on an outlying minor planet. There appear to be six life-signs."

"Life-signs?" Alice replied, stunned. "Who? Six isn't many for an ambush?"

"About right for a suicide squad," Malcolm intoned darkly, then watched as T'Pol keyed in a command for more detailed life-sign readouts.

Staring at the output, Malcolm blinked as if doing so could change it, or will it away. But of course it could not. His growing disquiet turned malignant and settled into his stomach, as if for good. Beside him, T'Pol, as well, seemed impelled into silence. Not as much as a sigh escaped her.

"What?" Alice prompted quietly, flicking her gaze between the medical scanners and their faces.

Malcolm sighed resignedly. "I owe you an apology, Alice. Turns out that you weren't a ranting drunk last night. You were Cassandra. It appears that indeed we _will_ go down to Epsilon Legato."

Alice quailed at the tone of his voice. "I always thought Cassandra might have been a heavy drinker. I think I would have been in her shoes. Why, though? Why are we going? Who's there?"

It was T'Pol that answered. "Children."

* * *

Phlox nodded. "Indeed. Specifically, Andorian children. Or at least that is how the readings appear from this distance."

Liz put down her fork, appetite lost. "But, how? Are there any Andorian children missing?"

"Not that we knew of," the doctor replied gravely. "Of course, while under the communications blackout of the _Treleishkah Protocol_ remains in effect, there is no way to ask. I understand Captain Archer is considering breaking the protocol and sending a message to Commander Shran, but..."

"...but they'll know why we turned our transponder off and will treat any communication as contaminated," Liz finished. "Damn. They won't listen, will they?"

Phlox shook his head. "No. We could complete the protocol. Move away, flash the main computer from the secure backup, observe the remaining days of quarantine. But, if the readings are correct, those children are alone. They may not be able to wait that long for help."

They were eating alone in Phlox's office so they could speak freely, Phlox in his habitual chair, Liz sitting on the desk rather than take the one which patients usually took. It was a superstition of hers, a way to separate the man from the doctor and the woman from the potential patient.

"They're the stick, if they are real," Liz murmured.

Phlox's forehead creased. "The _stick_? I don't understand."

"For the trap," Liz replied, voice rising. "The promise of data, of a _Treleishkah_ antidote, was the _carrot_ , and the children are the _stick_."

"An idiom?" Phlox inferred, at last. "The data, a reward, the carrot. The children in danger, a stick. What does that make us?"

"The donkeys."

"Ah," Phlox replied thoughtfully. "You deduce that we are being driven where we do not truly wish to go. Is it not possible that the children came to that place by some other means? That, seeking help, they sent a signal they had no way to know was threatening? Surely you do not think that we should leave them to their fate?"

A noise between a sob and a sigh forced its way through Liz's throat. Forced by the same arid rage that prickled her eyes with tears. "No. I don't. I'd be willing to die to save children if there was really a chance for doing so. But... but if this is a trap, and they are effectively dead already, or not even real- some sort of sensor ghosts- is _that_ worth dying for? Cause the children are the stick, and we are the donkeys, and the donkeys are walking on cobblestones of good intentions, and do you know where that road goes?"

Phlox shook his head. "I don't. Will you tell me?"

But Liz could only shake her head.

* * *

The restlessness had been growing for months. He had been sitting in the dark, a vortex of uncertainty and indecision, plagued by a languishing he could not name. When he opened the door, expecting Fabrecia, his face twisted as far from ambivalence to welcome as he could manage, he saw her instead and it was a revelation.

 _She_ had come.

She _did_ belong there.

Crepuscular rays. He had grown up in space, been almost seven when he had first seen them and had marvelled at them. Marvelled at the ugly name for a sight among the most beautiful he had seen. He had sought out other names - cloudbreak, sunburst, Jacob's ladder - which were better, although none would do.

And when Hoshi stood in his doorway, he recalled them - the crepuscular rays shimmering, rosing gold down from the clouds to the towering spires of Trillius Prime - and they slipped their invidious name, and became, for a moment, Hoshi and she them.

His breath stilled.

"Can I come in?" she asked. "I can't sleep."

Can't sleep? Travis could barely breathe. He wanted to ask her how to say 'epiphany' in every language which she knew, wanted to scour the tongues of Earth and the stars with her for a better name for Crepuscular rays.

"Of course, Hoshi." His tongue was so dry he barely managed it. It sounded strange. She, of all people, must have noticed that, but she did not say. She moved past him, stood absolutely still in the centre of the small room, a gentle, apologetic smile illuminating her familiar, singular face.

There was rightness, reverence; a sense of peace.

"I couldn't sleep," she said again. "Usually, I listen to music when I can't sleep, but..."

"But _Treleishkah Protocol_. No speakers..."

"Right. Would you keep me company for a while?"

Travis smiled. "Actually, I can do better than that, I think." He swept up his borrowed guitar.

Hoshi laughed, mostly silently, breathily, but the last few chuckles did manage to catch on her voice, sweet and clear. Then she sat, expectantly.

He fussed for a long time, twisting the pegs, plucking strings, then his fingers suddenly fell into the melody. It was a favourite song of hers, from her childhood. She had told him once, a few months ago, after _Treleishkah_ , when they were sitting through small hours together in a darkened messhall. The day after, curious, he had sought out the sheet music from the cultural database. And over the next few weeks patiently assembled its rhythm and chords. Added flourishes. And now it filled his quarters, and it belonged there too.

It was Hoshi's voice that caught now. "You are getting so good!" she said. "Did you really only start four months ago?"

He smiled. "Nah. Not exactly. I learned a bit as a child. Not formally, just messing around. And I hadn't played in ages."

"Well, it was _beautiful_. I love that song. "

He felt something - happiness, rare and uncomplicated - and plucked carelessly at the strings, bumbling out a cheery disorganised tune.

"Can I try it?" Hoshi asked, arm already outstretched.

 _Rightfully_ outstretched, Travis realised. He would deny her nothing.

He moved behind her, close enough to feel her body heat radiating from her back. He lifted the guitar over her head and guided her hands into the correct positions.

"Ow," she said, as he pressed the fingertips of her left hand into the strings.

"You need callouses," Travis said, softly, close enough to smell jasmine. "Your finger tips are too soft." He placed his thumb over her right thumb and pushed it down the strings. "That's E minor," he said, his lips the distance of a tremble from her skin. Then he positioned two of her fingers, added a third. "And that is C."

"C minor?"

He shook his head. "No, C major."

"Then show me C minor."

"You aren't ready for C minor." She twisted in ineffectual dudgeon, her face softening at once at where she found herself. Breathing each other's breath.

And, slowly, never hiding from her gaze, he lifted the guitar out of her hands.

* * *

The aroma of the tea soothes her, sweet, fresh and green. Her legs hurt. They hurt all the time now, only to greater or lesser degrees, a fact which made both doctors frown and click their tongues.

She supposes this is the type of thing one grew used to with time. Or perhaps a suitable treatment will be found. Or perhaps her mediation would grow more effective with time. Become healing.

Perhaps.

He has come again, brought her tea and she has lit the candles, but not yet the incense sticks, because she wants to enjoy the tea. Savour the little gift.

His touch is still strange, although whether it is him, or her now misaligned brain, she is not certain. It is not unpleasant in any case. Only _intense_. Both warm and cool, both gentle and firm and all at once.

"I did tell you," he says softly. "Said we should leave, not take any damn scans. Just leave. But, we've opened the box, and now we have to go."

"We are no more compelled than before," she replies. "If children are indeed on Epsilon Legato 8 alpha, then they would be there whether we detected them or not."

And yet she wonders. Wonders how information and free will really fit together when pared down to the smallest units of the universe. _Katra_ , and the vibration of tiny strings.

Then, he moves very close to her now. She can feel his breath on her neck.

"That's crap, you know. Galaxy's full of kids in mortal danger. But it's different when you know. When they're in front of you, looking right at you. Then, you have to go."

The room is haunted.

His distancing, his non-sequiturs, his colourful illogical metaphors all make havoc on her balance. He always tips her off centre. When he strokes her face lightly, it is like an explosion. And, over every part of her. She knows he hates the bond, but she pours her pleasure into it anyway. Otherwise the sensation necessary to sate him would be more than she could bear. It is a tool of survival.

An ocean of desire rises, and she is plunged into it, sinking, her tea spills onto the floor unheeded. She gasps for breath, speaks in the tongue of her childhood, directs pleasure at him like a shield.

She is taken, conquered, drowned.

* * *

With the new day, came the fruit of what they had done. So to would come knowledge, threat and Epsilon Legato. But for now, Hoshi pondered the room that was not hers. The bed. The arms encircling her. The scattered, intertwined clothes they had shed.

And, portends be damned, she felt… okay.

The best she had in ages, anyway. It was fragile; she instinctively knew the bargain entailed keeping herself firmly anchored to the present moment. The bed, the arms, the heartbeat resonating in the chest pressed to her ear.

When he woke, she asked him to play for her again. To brace the collapsing edges of this peaceful pocket universe with the song.

The song he had learned just for her.

Memories danced around the sweetly pitched notes. Noodles served in her treasured, bird-adorned bowl, her mother's wavering singing-voice. She sighed and relaxed into the sheets, held on to the final notes until they faded away.

They would have to get up now .

"Why did we wait this long?" Travis asked. He's really asking; there is a tremor in his voice. Uncertainty in it, although not, she suspects, in her, but in the narrative of his life. How do the threads weft together to bring them to this moment. By what calculus does their five years of friendship derive this moment.

Why did we wait this long?

There are answers to it. Mostly other goals, career objectives, maelstroms of tragedy. But also, different arms, different bodies; had, pondered, longed for.

They would have to get up now.

And Travis did so without his answer.

Hoshi stood up too, and picked among the various garments on the floor for enough attire for the short trip back to her quarters. "You're going to be late, if you don't hurry."

Travis swept her up, causing the laundry in her arms to fall. "Oh, I don't mind being late today. Especially don't mind if you give me a good reason."

Hoshi exhaled winsomely. "Oh, don't tempt me." It caused him to kiss her and more precious seconds were lost.

"You have time for breakfast, at least?" he asked, sighing as they stepped apart.

Hoshi pulled on her black t-shirt, still hunting for her jeans and socks. "No. And neither do you!"

"Coffee, then? We'll be a tiny bit late."

She smiled, smoothed her hair. "Alright. I'll meet you there."

"Excellent!"

Jeans found, socks forever abandoned to their fate, she left. Back in her own room, legs suddenly rubbery, Hoshi collapsed numbly onto her bed.

Why _HAD_ they waited this long?


	5. Chapter 5

"I think still think I should go."

Phlox had been expecting this, even if he could not quite understand the motivations behind it. Humans were far more predictable than they believed themselves to be. "If all three of us are on the station, _Enterprise_ will be left with only a very limited level of medical expertise."

Alice frowned. "That's not want I meant. I meant I should go _instead_ of at least one of you. Instead of you, probably. Liz and I should go. You stay here."

Phlox continued packing his kit, indicating that Alice should pass him some ametrazyline cartridges. "So what you meant was, not so much that you _should_ go, but rather that I _should not_?"

"Well, I guess? We don't know what's down there. Not really. You're our most experienced doctor. We shouldn't send you into danger, unless there is a good reason to think that extra experience will make a difference. There's no reason to think those kids are critically injured and even if they are, I used to be a trauma surgeon for Pete's sake. If there is one thing I can do it's..."

"Alice, as I recall, we used the same argument in sending you aboard _Treleishkah_ and, as it turned out, I was no safer here. Pass me some keratinotrophic gel patches, please."

Alice barely stopped wringing her hands long enough to hand him a stack from the draw behind her. "It will be different this time. _Enterprise_ is protected. It's..."

"It may or may not be different. We have no way to know," Phlox replied firmly, stowing the patches and closing the case. "Are you _good_ with children?"

Alice blinked. "I, erm...I like children. I wouldn't say that I'm terribly...no. Not really."

"Whereas, I am a father of five. While I have no doubt that you would be nearly, if not equally, as proficient at dealing with multiple complex paediatric traumas, I very much doubt you would be quite as good at luring a frightened child out of a hiding place and earning their trust. And, that same lack of experience applies to Ensign Boschmann, Lieutenant Reed, Commander Tucker, and, indeed, Liz, no?"

If Phlox had hoped that Alice wouldn't follow him to the launch bay in order to continue her exhortations, he was disappointed.

"I'll admit you have a kernel of a point there," she said, striding along beside him, at least having the decorum to carry the heavy medical kit. "However, the fact remains, I'm a better choice in this particular instance. With communications verboten, the away team will be almost completely out of contact with _Enterprise_. Morse Code, you'll be using. Morse-freaking-code. Do you know how long it takes to transmit any sort of useful information by Morse Code. How long it will take to call for help? How long it will take us to get it to you? I have more up-to-date Remote Area SAR training, more weapons training, SELET training, I can probably fly a 'pod if I absolutely must..."

"Yes, I'm familiar with your file," Phlox stopped walking abruptly and turned to face his junior. "There is no evidence that any of those skills will be required and good evidence that there _will_ be frightened children. You should know this. Unfortunately, I do not currently have the time to figure out what this is really about. But that should not imply that I am not interested. Kindly, see to the preparation of sick bay and we will discuss this further at a later date."

"It's not _ABOUT_ anything! I'm simply trying to see our resources deployed as I think best and I...have absolutely no chance of convincing you, do I?"

Phlox demurred. "I wouldn't say _no_ chance. However, if you have not opened with your strongest arguments, I would implore you to be more efficient in future."

Alice sighed, dropping her gaze to the ground, in what Phlox knew was a gesture of reluctant defeat. She did not protest when Phlox took the case from her, and remained stationary when he resumed his journey to the launch bay.

"Be careful," she called tensely from behind him.

"Of course." He did not turn around.

* * *

Even with all its instrumentation functioning, the 'pods systems must be considerably less sophisticated than the aerobatic little 'Firetail' pods Boschmann had operated before joining _Enterprise_. Yet, despite flying nearly exclusively by visual cues as demanded by _Treleishkah Protocol_ , she arced the 'pod elegantly over the structure rising out of the otherwise desolate plain below them.

"I'm sure we're all very impressed, Ensign," Malcolm murmured at what he was certain was relatively straightforward point in the procedure. "However, we do need to land at some point."

"Just getting a feel for the glide ratio," Boschmann replied in an amiable tone which suggested she'd recognised his attempt to ease the tension for what it was. "Thin air, here."

"Indeed, it is," Phlox confirmed. "It would behoove us not to linger outside."

Because Trip was oddly quiet, Malcolm felt the urge to reply. "I've no intention of lingering outside, Doctor. Although, for all we know, the place will look just as terrifying from the inside." He said it lightly, but the structure was indeed daunting.

Its serriform dome and aberrant spires bent the beams from the 'pod's external lights into inauspicious shadows. Malcolm tried to recall the name of the spider which the place brought to mind. They were not at all large, nor, he learned later, especially venomous, but Malcolm had seen them first with a small child's eyes. Although he had not usually been bothered by small creatures, he had disliked these spiders. Ugly, unsettling things, with their spurred and noxiously coloured carapaces. But between the arthropod-squeamish engineer, the xenophilic entomologist turned medic, the menagerie wielding doctor, and the hard-pressed pilot, the 'pod held no suitable audience for this particular comparison, so he joined the others in their silence.

The pod settled heavily into the dimly lit grey dust, tens of meters from the dome, which was no less imposing now that they stood at its base.

Neither the pod's external lights, nor the star system's cool and distant sun was sufficient to illuminate the whole thing as once. Hand-held scanners, with simplified displays and stripped of networking capacity, were cautiously extracted and pointed at the structure. Malcolm felt something akin to surprise when his displayed nearly exactly what might have been expected, the life-signs of six juvenile Andorians in an otherwise uninhabited structure.

"Anybody home?" Trip muttered, and Malcolm thought it might have been the first time he'd spoken since leaving the ship. "Boschmann, stay with the pod," he then said louder. "And keep her ready."

After Boschmann's plainly thankful retreat, the other four cautiously approached the structure. Malcolm found himself in the lead without making any effort to become so.

"On the plus side," Trip observed as they reached a disturbingly maw-like entrance, "I'm slightly more convinced it's not a trap. Why would someone setting out to make a trap make it look like a giant spider?"

"Well, quite," Malcolm replied, flippantly. "On the other hand, what sort of building would one design to look like a giant spider?"

"Dunno. Spider museum?"

"Oh, right. This must be the famous Epsilon Legato Giant Spider Museum, main draw-card and finest jewel of Sector Z-6."

"I believe we discussed the inadvisability of lingering, gentleman," Phlox interrupted. "The nearest of the life-signs is within a few metres of the entrance and the scanners continue to read it as a small child and not as a giant spider."

"I think they meant a giant museum of spiders, not a museum of giant spiders," Liz said inching toward the entrance. "Although damn thing's big enough to be a giant museum of giant spiders. Seems to be a rudimentary pressure seal. Atmosphere inside is pressurised to about the equivalent of 4000 metres on Earth, but there is a higher oxygen concentration. About 48%."

Malcolm inspected the readings over her shoulder, "48%? That will be handy if there's a fire."

Liz balked. "Why would there be a fire?"

"Why wouldn't there be a fire? The truth is we have absolutely no idea what we are walking into."

Trip sighed. "Well, let's find out shall we?" He cautiously approached the entrance. "Shouldn't be terribly hard to..."

With a rumbling hiss, the outer door slid open.

"...that."

Malcolm cautiously stepped forward. "Some sort of motion sensor?"

"I don't know, Malcolm. Can you _see_ a motion sensor?"

Malcolm checked his scanner again. "I can't, no. I'm reading systems. More or less consistent with what we saw on that drone ship. Closer to that than anything we know about from _Kumari,_ anyway."

"Agreed. Andorian kids or no, we can probably all agree this thing isn't Andorian."

"Yeah," Liz murmured from a step behind them. "I mean, do Andorians even _have_ Spider Museums? We going in, or what?" She took a reluctant step towards the doorway.

Trip turned to Malcolm. "So what do you think? We all go in together?"

"I suppose," Malcolm replied reluctantly. "There's still no indication that there's anyone here but those children and..."

"...and it's not like the Romulans can operate machinery over long distances or anything, like say a drone ship, or a huge dome-shaped trap?"

"Well, what do you want to do, Trip? Just leave?"

"I still say we try the transporter..."

"Which only risks A: Infecting Enterprise with another mind virus through the targeting scanners and, relatedly, B: Turning six kidnapped ally children inside out. Marvellous plan, that."

"Malcolm..."

"Well, I don't know about you, gentleman," Phlox interrupted. "But I have patients inside that building, and I would like to go in and help them. So, were you saying we should all go in together, Lieutenant?"

"I think so," Malcolm sighed, then shot a sideways look at Trip. "After all, there's always Boschmann to come and rescue us."

Trip sighed and then began moving cautiously through the outer doors. "Never going to live that down, am I?"

"I don't know what you mean," Malcolm replied following. "I was only mentioning Boschmann as an asset. I'm not sure why you think it was directed at you. There's nothing embarrassing about being rescued _by_ a woman half your size, _from_ a different woman half your size. Frankly, I'm surprised that you would have such an unenlightened attitude."

"Remind me why we are friends again?"

Malcolm's reply was cut off by the outer door abruptly sealing shut and a hiss of gas.

"Just oxygen and nitrogen," Liz called out quickly, voice shaking. "The pressure is equalising to the internal environment."

Exhaling tensely, Malcolm lowered the phase pistol he had just drawn.

"Planning on shooting the poison gas particles, were you, Lieutenant?" Trip asked in a thin voice.

Malcolm chuckled mirthlessly, then moved to place himself between the rest of the away team and the chambers inner door, which after no more than another minute of tense silence opened into a large dark space.

"One of the children is very close," Phlox said tensely in his ear. "Please remember both this fact, and the high oxygen concentration of the environment, before resorting to your phase pistol."

In response, Malcolm nodded shortly, and then, casting a last distrustful glance at his scanner, leaned out far enough into the dome proper to cast a beam of light around the surrounding darkness.

He saw nothing at all, and was about to say so, when a soft clambering sound caught his attention. This large inner space had a hollow, echoic quality and so it took him a few seconds to locate the cause, but eventually the torch light swept over a small, cowering figure, his back against one of several looming columns occupying the space.

The child did not react at all to the fixation of the torch light, but, at the sound of Malcolm's hesitant foot step, he again began to scramble, small head flicking wildly from side to side.

"It's alright, we won't hurt you," Malcolm called softly, counting that one of the others had initialised the universal translator and set it for Andorian. Malcolm sensed somebody, probably Phlox, at his shoulder, but when the Denobulan made no effort to take charge, Malcolm took another hesitant step forward. "Are you alone here? Are you injured? We can help. We will help…"

The child began to breathe more rapidly at the sound of Malcolm's cautious approach. He did indeed appear Andorian to Malcolm's eyes, about the size of a human four year old. At first, Malcolm thought that the characteristic Andorian blue skin was being washed out by the harsh beam of the torch, but, with each step closer, he became surer that this child's skin was instead a pearly translucent white.

"Doctor?" Malcolm asked, taking care to keep his voice low and smooth. "What…?"

"It would appear that we were mistaken, Lieutenant. Apparently the children are _Aenar_."


	6. Chapter 6

T'Pol pondered the ladder between the access tube where the isolated sensor output was located and junction F56-R. The impractical manifestation of the hastily jury-rigged 'air gap'. Her legs ached in protest at the prospect, but whenever her body was stilled, her stomach churned. There would no data regarding the safety of the away team except what she gathered herself by climbing and descending that ladder.

The last snapshot, the one before the one now loaded into the drive in her hands, had depicted a few arcminutes the shuttlepod's descent towards the dome, was just detailed enough to distinguish the individual identities of the passengers. Which seat _he_ had taken.

It was the recollection of that life-sign that filled her mind as she shifted her weight onto the highest rung, then she cleared her mind of all but mindfulness, mentally dissipating each shard of pain into a geometric pattern. Fractals, each different and more complicated than the last, punctuated each step of her descent. A Mandlebulb bloomed in her mind on the lowest rung and she stepped into the floor of the junction, gasp suppressed.

She is about to the connect the drive to the isolated computer, but holds off when she hears the junction is being approached from the other direction, and she composes herself to censure whomever is coming.

"Captain," she says, alarmed. "Security was directed to not permit anybody entry."

He smiles the casual smile that is his custom response to her caution. "I hold some sway around here. Especially on E-deck."

Unwise as his flippancy may be, he was likely in little danger as long as she did not connect the drive to the computer, especially if he stood unable to see the screen. And perhaps, not even then. There had been no ill-effects as yet detected. Likely, either the _Treleishkah_ mind-contagion could not be transmitted through the visual cortex of the brain or else it was not present in the scans. "Nonetheless, Captain. Your presence is inadvisable."

He raised his eyebrows, affecting surprise. "I was told you wished to speak to me privately. This is fairly private."

T'Pol frowned. "My intended interaction was not urgent. Whoever conveyed it to you erred in their judgement."

"I'm here now," he replied lightly.

"I was...curious regarding why I was not selected for this mission. There is no science officer on the team despite the clear utility of one given the unknown nature of the structure."

Archer's brow creased. "It's a rescue. We aren't exploring."

"Nevertheless, I..."

"T'Pol. You aren't cleared for away missions. Dr Phlox pulled your away mission authorisation several days ago."

T'Pol had had no idea. "Why?"

"I'm not privy to that," Archer responded, voice cagey. "Confidentiality. You'll have to talk to medical."

"I will," T'Pol responded. She had been about to question why a different science officer had not been sent, but somehow, the necessity of a science officer no longer seemed so compelling when she pictured one of her juniors rather than herself.

Archer exhaled, and appeared to be undertaking a careful study of her face. "I have every confidence in you. Both as my science officer and my second in command."

"Your reassurances are unnecessary, Captain. Vulcans do not experience unwarranted insecurity."

"And they don't lie, either. Right?" Archer replied, with a small smile.

"No, Captain," T'Pol replied firmly.

After all, a simplification of the truth was not a lie.

* * *

"Aenar?" Trip asked ponderously. "Us not hearing about six missing Andorian children is implausible enough, but six missing Aenar children? There probably only ARE a few hundred Aenar children."

"I do not have sufficient equipment at hand to be sure, Commander," Phlox replied. "But this child does appear to exhibit the hallmarks of the Aenar subspecies. We should all note that, as an Aenar child, he is unlikely to be sighted and may not have any spoken language. Communication could be problematic."

"He's hurt," Liz interjected. Her torchlight beam joined Malcolm's spotlighting the child. "Look. His abdomen." There was a gash in the dark garment which the child wore and rich, blue blood smeared the arm held protectively across it.

Cautiously, Phlox stepped forward. "It's alright, little one," Phlox said soothingly. "I am a Doctor and I intend to help you. I do not believe that you understand what I am saying, but I am hopeful that you are picking up on my intent with your telepathic abilities. Are you?"

The child's head turned cautiously in the general direction of Phlox's voice and his scramblings quieted slightly.

"A good sign, one hopes," Phlox said. "I am going to scan you now. It will not hurt. Elizabeth is my colleague and friend. She will bring my equipment to me."

Taking this as a directive, Liz pushed forward past Trip and Malcolm carrying the case. As she and Phlox examined the child, Malcolm took a moment to study his own scanner. The readings were completely unchanged. None of the other five life-signs in the building had moved at all.

"The other kids could be hurt as well," Trip said, his voice unusually thick. "We need to check on them."

Phlox rose to his feet. "I agree Commander. However, this wound is potentially life threatening and at least a day old. I cannot countenance any further delay before surgery. I would like you to direct Ensign Boschmann to return this child to Enterprise in the shuttlepod so that Alice can begin treatment without delay."

"Okay, agreed. I presume he'll be okay long enough to get to the pod?" When Phlox nodded, Trip continued. "Okay Liz, can you handle that? Tell Boschmann to give a quick report from the launch bay and then turn straight back around."

As Liz reached gently for the child, however, he became agitated once again, this time pointing wildly off into the darkness.

"It's alright," Malcolm said softly, his attention drawn back by the child's frantic movements. "We will help all your friends. We will. But you need to let us take care of you now." He tried clumsily to project this same intention with his thoughts, despite how profoundly uncomfortable he was with the idea of this child, of _anyone_ , reading his thoughts.

The child's empty gaze locked onto him somehow, his frantic movements stilling and his other arm, the one not clutching his wounded body, pointed, steadily and strongly in the same direction as before.

Instinctively, Malcolm drew a little closer, when the outstretched translucent fingers, reached out with uncanny accuracy and brushed, tentacle like against his cheek.

"Your brother is in danger. Right through there?" The words fell from Malcolm's mouth before he had even realised they had appeared in his head. The three other members of the away team wheeled around to look at him with expressions ranging from curiosity to horror.

"Why did you say that?" Trip asked warily, speaking first. "How did you _know_?"

Malcolm shrugged, trying to hide his disquiet. "I don't know, but…"

…but he was sure. And there was something else too. Something he couldn't quite bring to mind. Something about heat, a rushing of sound and air.

"...but I just know. It was just there in my head."

"Goddammit," Trip exhaled vehemently, then cringed when the child flinched away from his voice into Liz's waiting arms.

"I'm alright, I think," Malcolm tried to reassure Trip. "I don't think it was hostile. He's just a child. It was just…" It was hard to explain what it had been, though. He might have expected words in his mind, or something similar, but it hadn't been like that at all. He had just suddenly known something he had not known before.

"I don't like this." Trip's expression, fixed on the Aenar child was a somehow perfectly balanced between suspicion and compassion.

Phlox interrupted beseechingly. "Commander, the Aenar are a psychic people. How else do you expect an injured child to communicate? What else could we expect?"

"How did they _GET_ here?" Trip snapped in reply. "Six Aenar children alone in a building in an empty system with a Romulan telepresence beacon?"

"I don't know," Phlox replied calmly. "But here they are, nonetheless. Lieutenant, do you have a reading which might correspond to this boy's brother?"

The closest of the remaining five life signs was indeed in precisely the direction which the Aenar boy had indicated. "It's there," Malcolm confirmed. "Life-sign looks stable from what I can tell." The words were no sooner out of his mouth, when his head almost split with an onslaught of sensation. Again the heat and the strange rushing air, and an overwhelming sense of danger and of fear. Malcolm lost contact with his senses for a moment under the sheer intensity of it, staggering to stop himself falling when his mind cleared a moment later.

"Oh, what the hell?" Trip cried sharply reaching out to catch him.

"I'm alright, Trip. I'm fine," Malcolm said reassuringly, although as he sniffed to clear his nose, he detected a sharp metallic taste in the back of his mouth. He steadied himself using Trip's outstretched arm and submitted to a scan by Phlox.

"I detect no ill effect," the doctor said after a moment.

Malcolm nodded. "I feel fine, now. I was just disorientated for a moment. I think this kid is really worried about his brother. We should go see."

Trip sighed tensely, then nodded. "Okay. Liz, are you okay to get this one to the shuttle? Comm-link use is hereby authorised. I don't want this kid accidentally knocking you out the moment you are out of sight." Trip activated his suits in built comm-link causing a sharp buzz of static in the ears of the other three. "Keep your receivers on a narrow frequency band. We don't want to pick up anything else. Boschmann, you there?"

"Here sir."

"We found kids here, after all. One kid, at least. He's injured though, so he needs to get to Enterprise as soon as possible. Liz is going to bring him to you, okay? Round trip, as quick as you can."

"Copy that, sir. Transport patient to Enterprise then return to landing site, ASAP."

Trip offered an assent then signed off and turned back towards the team. "Malcolm? You sure you're okay? You don't want to go back?"

Malcolm again declared himself fine. He helped Liz lift the injured boy onto the hip of her EV suit, once she and Phlox had finished applying a dressing adequate for transport. "We'll help your brother, and the others," he said again awkwardly, and was startled when the boy reached out and briefly squeezed his gloved hand.

"Looks like you've made a friend," Trip observed as they watched Liz and the boy move through the inner door of the entrance chamber. Malcolm couldn't help but notice how perturbed his friend sounded. "I thought you said you weren't good at kids."

"I don't know how to talk to children," Malcolm agreed unhappily. "It seems like that's less of a problem, though, when you can communicate with them psychically."

Trip clicked his tongue unhappily, but led the trio off into the darkness.

* * *

Notionally in command of the bridge, while Captain Archer walked off his frustration by 'checking how T'Pol's doing', Travis fixed his gaze on the viewscreen. Most of its interfaces had been disengaged under _Treleishkah Protocol_ , and so it was now functioning more or less as a window, albeit a window with its field of view markedly enhanced by a sophisticated series of finely ground lenses.

Around the ship guards were posted looking through various, less-augmented view ports, scanning for danger what little space was illuminated by Enterprises external lights or the light reflected from Epsilon Legato. It was, Travis mused, not a little like being a sentry posted on the battlements of a castle at night. If, that was, such sentries had had a 3rd dimension of attack to worry about, and were scouting for an enemy who could appear out of thin air. For, he remembered uneasily, even Daniel's quantum beacon had been unable to detect that cloaked, raptor-like Romulan ship they had encountered in the minefield.

Not for the first time, he wondered why a species who could build ships capable of that would need to lure Enterprise ANYWHERE. They could be gliding, unseen, over the rings of Saturn for all Earth would know.

But, Epsilon Legato turned darkly below, and the rest of the screen remained empty.

Hoshi sat behind him, but even if he'd dare risk the inattention, he would not have taken a glance. Because, beside her, replacing T'Pol at science, was Irene Tseng, the dead Crewman Lazlo's inamorata, Wendall's hostage, the woman who had placed that lethal, lifesaving shard of glass into Travis's hand.

Tseng had made cautious overtures of friendship towards him in the past, perhaps she felt some connection from their shared ordeal - some kinship- but the sight of her filled Travis with bitterness. Why couldn't Tseng have reaped her own revenge? Covered _herself_ in Wendall's blood. How did she not burn with shame at the presumptuousness of dropping death into Travis's hands, and then scurrying away?

Perhaps too, if he had turned around, he'd have seen the bodies on the floor. The blood. Perhaps, even if he had managed to fix his gaze to Hoshi, he'd have seen, not her eyes, but Fabrecia's eyes staring back, her threadbare loyalty turned to accusation. No, it was better to look forward. To diligently audit his assigned sector of sky.

But, Epsilon Legato turned darkly below, and the rest of the screen remained empty.


	7. Chapter 7

The away team moved cautiously through the lightless dome, each door the encountered hissing open automatically, each corridor narrow, with the ceilings high enough that they were almost beyond the reach of the torch lights. Their own bodies cast long, distorted shadows against the gently convex walls.

Following the route traced out by the scanner, they moved towards the life-sign, eventually arriving at a sealed door, their target reading a few metres beyond it. Unlike the other doors, this one did not open automatically. Neither did it open when Trip experimentally tapped at something resembling a key pad.

"Can you open it?" Phlox prompted the engineer, who was considering it ruminatively, while Malcolm was engrossed in trying to make sense of the readings in the room beyond.

Trip considered the controls with a half frown and reached into his kit for a hypo-spanner. "Should be able to…"

"Wait," Malcolm called suddenly. Trip and Phlox turned to stare. "I think I might know the code," he continued weakly under their glares and then reached for the key pad, each consecutive symbol only occurring to him after the last was entered.

Trip sighed and turned away. "Fucking hell, Malcolm. You are so fucking quarantined when we get back…"

Trip's voice died away when the door hissed open and Phlox's torch light illuminated the space beyond. The engineer started forward at the sight of another child, which could have been the twin of the one they had just met, bruised and dirty, and anchored to the floor with a heavy chain.

Malcolm was only just able to stop Trip in time, catching him by the waist and pulling him back so sharply that they almost both ended up on the floor. No longer blocked by the heavy door, the readings had coalesced on his scanner, but, if he was honest, the realisation had sprung into Malcolm's mind before he'd had time to take in the readings on the screen.

 _…Intense heat. Rushing air…._

"Pressure plate," he whispered sharply to Trip as he helped him upright and pulled him back a few more steps away from the edge of the thing. The child before them trembled at the sound.

"Wired to what?" Trip asked in reply in the same low tones.

Malcolm didn't answer aloud, but held his scanner up for Trip to see while blocking Phlox's ingress into the room with his other arm. The scanner showed that under the floor there was a pressure sensor and a large volume of explosives.

* * *

"Oh, I've never seen an Andorian before in real life," Fabrecia said, as she helped Liz, in her bulky suit, lift the child into the 'pod. "They look bluer in pictures." Then she smiled down at the child. "Hi there, kid, what's your name?"

"He's _Aenar_ ," Liz explained, opening her helmet to enjoy a few minutes of 'pod air, before she would need to trek back across to the dome. "We don't think he can speak. Or _see,_ for that matter. But that's normal for Aenar. He seemed to sort of communicate psychically with Lieutenant Reed before, although, honestly we aren't really sure what happened."

"Oh. You must have a name, though," Fabrecia said, then catching sight of the wound on the child's abdomen she gasped. "Oh, how did this happen?"

The ailing child leaned into Fabrecia's arms and, without thinking, she reached to brush back some silvery white hair from his face. As her finger tips brushed along his forehead, Fabrecia was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation of falling and a heavy painful sensation in her abdomen; pain that shattered almost immediately as if it had never been.

Struggling to catch her breath, she realised that it was a memory;

 _..._

 _when she had been about twelve years old Fabrecia's feet, clad in her new silvery blue shoes, had become tangled on the stairs and she had fallen forward into space. She had collided with her mother's arm, outstretched to catch her. The force had been enough to fracture the arm and her mother had missed five nights of gigs before it was fully healed, an event significant and unexpected enough to derail the precariously balanced family finances and almost see Fabrecia ejected from flight school. She had never been blame, but still shuddered at the memory._

...

"You fell," she whispered through dry lips. "You fell and collided with something."

Weak and feverish, the child did not visibly react, but Fabrecia knew somehow she was correct. Something else appeared in her head as well. A string of symbols in an unfamiliar script. If it was a name, she did not know how to read it.

"Are you okay?" Liz asked, voiced heightened in alarm.

"Yeah, I think," Fabrecia said. "That was a bit weird, but I think it's over now."

As she pulled herself straight, the shuttle's comm unit, honed tightly on the EV suit frequency band crackled to life.

 _"Ensign Boschmann, you there?"_

"Receiving you, Commander. Crewman Cutler and the child are here."

 _"Good. We've got a problem though, Ensign."_

Fabrecia frowned. "Sir?"

"Another child. This one chained to a bomb."

Fabrecia fought a sudden urge to clamp her hands over the ears of the boy in her arms. "I take it, you aren't speaking figuratively, sir? What do you need?"

 _"We need Cutler back. And I'm grounding you until we know what we are dealing with. I don't want this thing going off while you're in the air above us."_

Fabrecia cast an anxious eye over the child. Deep blue blood was now seeping through the dressing, pooling visibly under the impervious outer layer. "I can alter my flight plan, sir. Take off away from the dome?"

 _"Put a pin in that for now, Fabrecia. Keep an eye on a med scanner though. We'll risk it if he starts getting worse. And send Cutler back, ASAP."_

"Copy that." Fabrecia looked over toward Cutler, to ensure that she had heard and was surprised to see her attention elsewhere.

"Did you feel that?" Cutler asked, brow furrowed, when their eyes met.

"Feel what?"

"I thought I felt…I don't know. A vibration?"

Fabrecia's eyes widened as she spun to look at the dome, but it appeared unchanged. Shooting a reassuring smile at the boy, who she'd momentarily forgotten couldn't see, Fabrecia leaned on the comm.

"Shuttlepod 2 to Commander Tucker?"

 _"What's up, Boschmann?"_

Sighing with relief, she explained. "Crewman Cutler said she felt a vibration. I wanted to check that…"

 _"It wasn't us. Anything on 'pod sensors?"_

"Sensors are still off sir," Fabrecia replied uncertainly.

 _"Of course they are, Ensign. Sorry. Have you…"_

 _"_ There it is again," Cutler said sharply, and this time Fabrecia felt something as well.

"Still there, sir? We just felt it again…"

She was interrupted by a beeping sound from the 'pod's console.

* * *

"Sir, we have an urgent message from Commander T'Pol from junction F56-R."

Jon, only a few minutes returned from that very place, turned from his moody contemplation of the viewscreen to face Hoshi. The ship-wide comm system was still deactivated, but in recognition of the impracticality of transporting messages by PADDs around the ship, a simplified text based communication system was in operation. It was not as secure as Jon would like, and took some getting used to, but it was at least serviceable. "What is it?"

"She says that the latest sensor sweep of the planetoid suggests an increase in seismic activity near the location of the dome. She's in the process of taking another scan, but…"

"You said we have an emergency protocol in place for contacting the away team?"

Hoshi nodded. "Yes sir. Morse code, sir. On a pure, unvarying frequency. It's our belief that the telepresence technology relies on complex subspace frequencies so, in theory at least, it's safe."

"Then let them know. And send a message to Lieutenant Hess. Tell her I want the transporter targeting scanners isolated from the main computer as soon as possible, and additional firewalls around the pattern buffers. Tell her an operational transporter is her first priority."

"Aye, sir."

A fucking earthquake. _Unbelievable_.

* * *

 _"Shuttlepod 2 to Commander Tucker?"_

Trip heard Malcolm mutter under his breath at the interruption. Together, they were trying to piece together the details of the explosive device without the need for closer scans, which, Malcolm was highly concerned, might trigger it. The hope was that they would be able to disarm it, or at a minimum, be able to move onto the pressure plate to render first aid to the obviously injured child. Phlox and Cutler were bunkered several rooms away for safety.

"What is it, Fabrecia?"

 _"Sir, we've had a message from Enterprise. 'Beware increasing seismic activity.' About a minute ago"_

Trip locked eyes with Malcolm. "An earthquake going to trigger this thing?"

"I would say it's a distinct possibility, yes," Malcolm replied tersely.

"What do we do?"

"Finish before one hits."

Trip exhaled, surveying the child's eerily translucent skin. Not allowing himself to notice the heart-rending, cherubic face, or the tiny clenched fists. "There are four other children in this building, as well as the four of us. What happens if this thing does go off?"

"The initial blast would kill anyone still in this room, from what I can tell. The walls are heavily built so it shouldn't spread much more than that, but…"

"But what?"

Malcolm sighed. "But the hydraulics…..right through all the walls there are these hydraulics, maybe they have some sort of other purpose, some sort of circuitry? But the point is that they're flammable…fuel. And with the high oxygen levels, there's amble oxidant…"

"….and with an explosion for ignition, we are three for three. There's that fire you were worried about," Trip finished tersely. "So what do we do?"

"His arm is broken…. Badly. He turned a little before and I'm pretty sure I saw bone."

"What do we do, Malcolm?"

"We get the other children out first, the rest of you leave the building…and then I try to figure something out."

* * *

"The remaining four are through there."

Faced with another door that would not open, and having left Malcolm, unfathomable code guessing ability and all, tensely monitoring the explosive apparatus, Trip turned to Phlox and Liz. "Either of you care to try to guess the code to this one?"

After a tense grimace from Liz, and no notable reaction from Phlox, he set to work on the hydraulic lock, prizing of an access panel and immediately making a mental list of tools he wished he had brought when confronted with the labyrinthine workings behind it.

"Door's warm," he murmured after a moment.

Phlox consulted his scanner. "Indeed Commander. The ambient temperature is considerably higher in the chamber beyond. Approximately 45 degrees Celsius."

"45, huh? That must be pretty uncomfortable for kids from the pole of an ice moon."

"From the little experience we have with Aenar, it would appear that they, like Andorians are capable of tolerating a relatively wide range of temperatures," Phlox observed mildly. "However, it is curious. It would take energy to heat this chamber to this temperature and it has presumably not been done for the comfort of the children within it. Are you alright, Commander, you yourself look a little heated?"

Trip smiled grimly, tilting his head to try to follow the path of circuitry beyond the small access panel and up into the wall. "It's not the heat, Doc. It's more the fact that I'm working on circuitry the likes of which I've never seen before and I've got an officer and a kid sitting on a bomb a few rooms away and the ground itself could be getting ready to open up and swallow us."

"So you would say the circuitry you see here is unlike the circuitry which you and Mr Reed saw aboard the Romulan Drone Ship?" Phlox replied. "I would have assumed it would be similar."

Trip sighed through the hypospanner he was currently holding between his teeth. "Sure this is similar in the same way that a warp engine is similar to a toaster oven."

"Oh? My understanding was that the drone ship was particularly sophisticated."

"Not really. I mean the telepresence transceiver unit was, obviously. And the multispectral emitter and weapons were a sight to see. But most of ship, the relays controls, and nuts and bolts were pretty basic. Like they were fixing to turn out a few thousand of them. Whereas this circuitry on the other hand seems to have some sort of complex, three dimensional, sorta-isohedral superstructure, which... Wait a second, Doc. Are you actually interested in any of this?"

"I did ask, didn't I?"

"Yeah, but... You aren't, are you? You're trying to distract me from thinking about how many of us are going to be killed if I make a mess of this, or if my hand slips..."

Phlox raised his eyebrows. "Well, I do have something of a personal interest in preventing that explosive from detonating. Perhaps not to the same extent as Mr Reed, but, if I were to have my preference..."

Trip carefully redirected a circuit, not entirely certain that this relatively simple solution would be effective. To his delight however, the lock disengaged with an audible thud. "That oughta do it."

Without the aid of the hydraulics, it took most of their strength to pull open the heavy, uncomfortably hot doors, after which they were all but struck in the face with the not only stiflingly warm but also oppressively humid air. A moment later a fetid, sulphurous stench bombarded their nostrils. Liz doubled over, gagging and soon retched up a small volume of clear fluid, the thin acidic odour of which actually managed to improve the noxious miasma.

Trip, his faced turned instinctively from the noxious air, heard Phlox's exclamation before he'd had a chance to survey the room beyond. However, the ludicrously restrained "Oh, dear" did nothing to prepare him for the sight.

About the size of a cargo bay, the space was filled with rows of ovoid pods. Judging from the six clustered to the away team's right, the pods were supposed to be a glowing translucent white and lit with a gentle glow, the fluted bases and tops somehow grown into the honeycombed structures in the floors and ceilings. Within those four of those six, they could just make out the forms of antennaed children, floating serenely in the milky liquid within. But the other pods - and Trip was unable to stop himself from counting ten rows and twelve columns - the other pods, were darkened, putrid and dead.


	8. Chapter 8

Fabrecia's fingers drummed on the console before her. She had begun doing so unconsciously, a sop to the tension, and had previously stopped, worried that the sound might be distressing her tiny, pale companion. The effect was the opposite though, or she thought it was, because there was little outward change, but she had been somehow struck with understanding that the little boy found the rhythmic roll of her fingers soothing, and was well aware that she was tense anyway.

"Do you like that _, Lieveheersbeestje_?" she had asked, worried about the appellation, but more uncomfortable without one, and unsettled by the series of symbols that filled her head whenever she asked, aloud or to herself what his real name was. She was again, unaccountably sure that the bouy liked this development. She felt a soft prickle in her mind and an image of the cheery scarlet, black-spotted beetles filled her mind and the little boy was smiling softly.

"Pretty, huh?" she asked, her mind skirting around how he could know what she was saying, or what she was seeing in her mind's eye. He was only a child. "Pretty things."

She startled a little at the sound of the comm.

"Tucker to Boschmann."

"Yes, Commander, reading you."

A slightly unpleasant tension filled Fabrecia's brain, suddenly overwhelmed with images of her brothers.

"Anything else from Enterprise about the tremors?"

"No, sir." Tucker's voice had sounded odd. Flat. Fabrecia wondered what was wrong.

"Then you should take your one up to Enterprise. Get him to sickbay. We're not going to be done here soon."

There was a sharp intake of breath next to her as the orders filtered through her mind. More recollections of her brothers, an image of a preschool Maikel, sick with a bad 'flu becoming most prominent. "Copy that, sir," she managed to gasp out around it. "It will be okay _, Lieveheersbeestje_."

The third night Maikel was in hospital, there had been a noticeable change in her mother, her stepfather, and even the doctors and nurses. A tension through the centre of their foreheads. Her mother had held Maikel in his bed, threading her arms through the multiple snaking tubes and lines while her stepfather had cradled Fabrecia herself in a nearby chair, whisphering Kolibre, her pet name and stroking her hair as they'd waited for dawn and the fate brought with the new day. It was Maikel's face on that night, coloured oddly by illness and the hospital's blue-white lights, that filled her mind now. The night she'd been sure he'd die.

"It's okay," she repeated softly, unsure now who she was addressing, and raced through a perfunctory pre-flight check and into the air, transmitting 'returning' in Morse, to Enterprise, worrying she'd misspelled it, chastising herself to focus. A chart depicting the code lodged in her mind's eye and was peculiarly hard to shake. Beside her, small fingers began tapping thoughtfully.

She arched away from the dome, mentally calculating a launch corridor, previous launch corridors from previous launches, previous planets, flicking through her minds like playing cards. "Get out of my mind, _Lieveheersbeestje_ ," she chided softly. "I'm using it right now." She imagined she felt a quiet withdrawal. _Just a child_.

Then, a thermal caught the pod's small wings and they lurched upward violently. Fabrecia's fingers hovered over the controls which would disable _Treleishkah_ Protocol and give her instruments back, but did not yet press. Instead, she abandoned her planned corridor and sought to ride the spiral of warm arm to it's top, following it by feel. The lift was nothing compared to that offered by the thrusters, the pod was to heavy and the wings to small. But, there were no clouds, no birds even, to mark any others, and better the thermal you know than continuously colliding with the ones you don't. Especially with a nervy little kid who'd never flown before.

"What? No... of course you've flown before," Fabrecia murmured shaking away the thought. "You must have. How else did you get here?"

If the jumbled images that appeared then in her mind were an answer, then it was unintelligible.

Nearly at the top of the spire of thin, warm air, they were still relatively low in the atmosphere. Fabrecia recalculated her launch corridor, and in doing so risked a glance at the dull, grey ground far below them. Suddenly, her lap was filled with a scrambling frantic child, knocking her hands from the controls.

"Easy, _'beestje_ ," she called alarmed, just as long, translucent fingers clamped onto her face and...

 _...it was June 24th, 2149, and she was plummeting towards Goleta Slough in a smoking Firetail flitter, about to experience the first and worst crash of her career. She was already quite badly burned. The collision with her teammate, who had unaccountably yawed directly into her starboard wing during a close manoeuver, had caused some sort of overload, and a light but searing rain of plasma had broken out above her. Parts of her hands and arms screamed with pain and more badly burned parts hurt not at all, but her main problem was Galeta, spiralling towards her._

 _She knew she crashed. The memory of the surgeries and the agonising months of rehab floated alongside this one. The knowledge didn't help though, nor the years of second guessing, which were there as well. As she had done the first time, she struggled to arrest the spin, battling the unresponsive controls to change the configuration of the Firetail, to get the nose up._

 _The ejection system was broken, and she was too low to eject anyway. All that would accomplish was dying outside. She considered it anyway. In her head she screamed in terror and swore in escalating free verse. Months later, hearing on the black-box that she had in fact been perfectly silent, she assumed there had been some mistake._

 _Goleta Slough was seconds away and while the nose was lifting, and the spin was slowing, it would not be in time. Maybe if she had had thirty more metres... twenty even._

 _At the last moment her arms flew up over her face, and then the world was red and black and pain..._

... and then it was September 4th, 2155, and she was plummeting toward Epsilon Legato in a shuttlepod while an hysterical child was apparently trying to literally crawl into her head.

Mercilessly, she grabbed the flailing arms and forced the boy hard back into the seat next to her.

"Stay there!" she snapped, heartbreaking at the answering whimper. "That won't happen. We aren't crashing. We won't."

Spinning back towards the controls she bit down on the panic, half aware that only part of it was naturally hers and tried to assess the situation.

She had no idea why the nose was down, or why they were rolling slowly but inexorably to the left. She worked on resetting her ailerons and elevators. The autopilot, disabled along with most of the flight instrumentation was useless and could not be restarted in time. The atmospheric thrusters were struggling in the thin, highly ionised air and with a growing sense of familirity, Fabrecia realised that, although she knew how to correct her flight, she either did not, or only barely had the time to do so.

She needed her hands to delay the inevitable, but lifted one from the controls for long enough to snag one of the child's hands and press it firmly onto the pod's transceiver. Then, with as much of her mind as she could spare, she pictured Morse Code.

.-.. .- -.- -.. .- -.-

Mayday. SOS would have been shorter, but she gambled on the slightly longer message. 'SOS' had taken on the second meaning of 'I am using Morse code right now', and they could die if the seriousness of their situation was misunderstood, even a short time . She heard gentle tapping, but did not risk a glance.

For forty seconds nothing happened except the slowly spinning ground growing inevitably closer. She was levelling out her pitch, could see a sliver of sky through the front window, but most of it was filled with the drab grey clay dust of the planet. They had, maybe, twenty seconds.

When the child beside her shimmered away, Fabrecia felt relief and an instant lightening of the heavy panic all but engulfing her. The child was safe and she was well clear of the dome. At least she would take no one with her. The transporter had been isolated from the main computer, and so definitely limited to one pattern at a time. She wondered how long it would take to reset. If its jury-rigged new configuration would make this process faster or slower. If it was still safe. If it was _ever_ safe. She knew very little about such things.

Either way, in just a few seconds she would be in pieces.

* * *

"Are these four alive?"

Phlox frowned. "That is perhaps a more complicated question than you envisaged asking, Commander. But, broadly speaking, yes."

"Complicated _how_?"

"These status pods are made of a substance which seems to repel most of our scanning frequency bands, but from what I can detect, there little to no neural activity at all. The endogenous neural tissue appears undamaged, and undergoing near normal cellular metabolism, but is reading as isoelectric. The autonomic functions, typically under the control of the brain stem, appear to be under the control of the pods."

Tucker shifted unhappy. His hand hovered millimetres from the surface of the closest pod, but he did not touch it. "So what does that mean?"

"Well, I suppose I would be forced to characterise it as a state of profound coma. I am unlikely to be able to determine what has caused it, or indeed whether it would be reversible, under the conditions at hand."

"Can we get them out?"

"I'm not certain," Phlox replied. "Given that there are two empty pods, and we have observed two children, it would seem logical to conclude that it is possible. I do not, however, have any idea how to accomplish it. Safely or otherwise."

Liz walked slowly over to darkened screen, which occupying most of a wall, overhanging what might have been a work terminal. "Could be the pods are operated from here, but it's all switched off."

"And I'm not keen to start switching things back on, with that bomb back there," Tucker replied. "How did the other two get out? How did any of them get IN, for that matter?" He circled the pods again to make sure, but still saw no aperture through which the children might have escaped. "What if we just cut them out?"

"I've no idea, Commander. It could work perfectly, or kill them, or possibly even trigger that explosive device back there. Without considerable further study, there is just no way to know."

"I'm sorry," Liz interrupted sharply. "But we don't have time for considerable further study. We've got a sick and injured child back there sitting on an unexploded bomb. These four are stable, he isn't."

Phlox frowned. "I'm afraid that it's not that simple, Elizabeth. Just as any attempt to activate the pods could trigger the bomb, and kill that child, any attempt to evacuate that child could also trigger the bomb and kill these four."

"But we can't just leave him there, indefinitely, while we try to sort this mess out. That protruding bone is infected. His arm will be beyond saving soon if it isn't already. He's in pain, and terrified, and..."

"...and _one_ alone. Elizabeth, we cannot risk four lives to save one life, let alone one limb."

Liz's eye's narrowed. "We don't know that we are. Their brain activity is effectively non-existent. You had to hold your nose to even call it a coma, and you have no idea whether it is reversible. We can't forget about the seismic activity. I am NOT saying that we abandon these four, I think we should cut open the pods and take them with us before we mess with the bomb, but I don't think we should risk the life we know we can save to slightly increase our chances with four we aren't sure are still really alive."

Phlox's head jerked backwards in shock, but before he could reply, Trip held up his hands. "It sounds like the bomb is the problem and that we have five kids chained to it, instead of one," he said staring down the doctor and the scientist in turn. "What we need to do is go talk to Malcolm."


	9. Chapter 9

_Medical team to transporter room_

"Come on then, Andy," Alice said, snatching up a medkit.

Andile Ayodele, Enterprise's Comparative Xenoanatomist, and highly reluctant second medic, eyed the kits uncertainly. "What do we need?"

"Just grab another standard kit," Alice shouted over her shoulder, not turning to see if he had caught up before continuing. "I mean, they could make our lives way easier if they'd give us a hint of what we're running into. Accident, illness, alien probe possession? Who knows? In this particular instance, I'd settle for broad details. Number of casualties? Children or adults? Andorian, Denobulan, Human, all three? But no. It's always just _'Medical team to transporter room'_. They like to keep us guessing, I suppose. Prevents burn out. Otherwise, we'd be all _'Half the away team has been eaten by a giant lizard, AGAIN? I'm not jogging for that!_ ' But if they _DON'T_ tell us, then, it could always be something good, or something funny, or cake, possibly. One time, it's bound to be cake, and it will be a total surprise, because we'll be expecting partially digested ensigns and instead..."

"Do you like cake?" Andy asked hesitantly, a pace behind. "Because the rumours are that you subsist entirely on coffee, scotch, and strawberries..."

Alice shrugged. "Well, I wouldn't say ENTIRELY. Like many terrible people, I'm also nourished by despair, and the tears of my victims. And, anything with coconut milk in it. That stuff is delicious."

Rushing into sickbay, they were both nearly bowled over by a flash of black-clad white, which detached itself from Crewman Pargiter at the transporter console and launched itself into their arms.

"Hey, there. Settle down, laddie," Alice said, trying to still the still scrambling figure long enough to scan him. "Awfully pale for an Andorian, aren't ye, sweetheart? There's a subspecies though, isn't there, Andy?"

Andy nodded. "Yes'm. They're called the Aenar. More or less the same except unsighted, only very sparsely pigmented epithelia and telepathic."

"Andy, ' _More or less the same, except telepathic_ ' is one of those sentences, isn't it? Kind of like, this hamster is pretty much like any other hamster, except its forty metres tall and has laser vision..."

Andy replied over the sound of Pargiter engaging the transporter again. "What I meant was that from a medical point of view...oh shit. _SWAP_."

"What?" Alice looked up and caught the sight of an obviously badly injured Fabrecia Boschmann materialised on the transporter platform. She firmly pressed the Aenar child into Andy's arms and raced forward. "What the hell?"

"Shuttlepod crash," Pargiter put in quietly, stepping forward but unsure how to help further.

"And did you pull her out before or after she crashed?" Alice asked, scanning the battered, unconscious pilot.

Pargiter stammered. "Well, I... I think... during?"

" _DURING_?"

"Well, the process isn't instantaneous and there's software for cancelling out acceleration and relative velocity between the subject and the platform. Well, I mean, obviously there is. And I think it probably worked okay, but we had to isolate the targeting scanners from the main computer and..."

"Aye, I get it. As if the damn thing isn't infernal enough...Is there no one else to come up? No? Then let's leave her on the platform till we've stabilised her spine. Elspeth, could you maybe carry the little one down to sickbay for me? Andy and I will manage Bree."

Alice turned her attention away from the scene of Elspeth Pargiter trying to detach the tiny child from the towering Xenoanatomist and focused instead preparing Fabrecia for transfer to sickbay. By the time Andy was able to join her, it was a matter of carefully rolling her onto the rigid evacuation board. "Straight to the imaging chamber. She seems stable, but we need to know how badly she's been scrambled."

Bearing Fabrecia, they arrived in sickbay long enough after Pargiter for the Aenar child to have become fascinated with the cooing sounds of Phlox's menagerie. "He won't sit down," Pargiter apologised, as Alice and Andy loaded Fabrecia into the imaging chamber, pausing only long enough to establish IV access and a series of monitors.

"Tough little lad, isn't he?" Alice replied. "Nasty gash like that, and a shuttle crash, and he's still on his feet. Don't suppose you got a name?"

"I don't think he can talk," Pargiter replied. "Or see, for that matter."

"Andy?"

"That's normal, I think."

Alice nodded, eyes fixed on the screens where the scans would appear. "Andy, would you page Lieutenant Sato, please? We need to at least be able to talk to the lad."

As Andy moved off, Travis Mayweather strode into sickbay, eyes wide. "Report."

"Child's stable. Aenar, or somesuch rather than Andorian... We're assessing Fabrecia now. Honestly, Travis, it might be better if you wait somewhere else. You're a little too _involved_ to be in here."

Travis stared uncomprehendingly at the complex overlapping images appearing on the screens. "But she will be okay, won't she?"

Alice flipped rapidly through a series of images, then studied a few more carefully. "I'm going to do everything I can. "

Provisionally satisfied by Fabrecia's early scans, Alice hurried over to double check the child. He was currently mimicking the chirps of a highly disgruntled Pyrithian bat. Pargiter, Alice noticed with some irritation, had absented herself.

"Sorry, laddie," she said, crouching down to his height, despite being aware he could not see her. "My name's Alice, and I'm a Doctor. Would it be alright if I looked at your belly there? It looks a wee bit sore, and I'd like to help with that."

With no translator available, it was more patter than anything else, but the child reacted as if he had understood and even as if he had warily consented, turning to face her and withdrawing the arm guarding the ragged gash. It was deep, and infected, but fortunately the membrane equivalent to the peritoneum was intact.

Alice tried to smile reassuringly, alarmed to find herself wondering why the child seemed to remind her so strongly of ladybirds when there was not the slightest actual resemblance. "Looks like the nasty bugs haven't got to your guts, so that's good," she said gently. "But you're going to need some medicine and I'm going to need to clean that wound. Lieutenant Sato will be here in a minute and she'll figure out a way to explain it all to you. And hopefully she's good with kids, because I'm rubbish. That's the whole reason I got benched in the first place, actually."

A small ghostly smile appeared on the child's somehow searching face, but then his brow furrowed. Soft ghostly fingers reached out to Alice's face and then...

 _...it was April 2153. Alice wasn't sure what day, they ran together. She had not been outside for several._

 _The hospital in Montgomery was, had been, state of the art. Now, overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, it was barely clean._

 _They brought mostly kids. That wasn't official triage policy, but there were so many injured that policy collapsed. Given ordinary people were doing the triaging, they got kids, pregnant people, LEOs, and first responders. Collapsed buildings, traffic accidents and gun shots in the panic. And weet, hurt little kids, who lost their homes, families, friends, maybe the use of a limb or two._

 _And they just kept coming._

 _She called time of death on a John Doe that couldn't have been more than sixteen, and had probably died for all intents and purposes days ago, and then washed her hads again, the dry, reddened skin splitting in a new place._

 _"Harper! Consult!"_

 _It was probably better she didn't know how long it had been since she slept. Clocks were little help. Twenty three past ten. But what day? Or was it night? "What do we have?"_

 _"38 month old Monette Fortier, PGCS 6 down from 10. Brady, hypertensive. Pupils unequal and sluggish. Distended abdomen. Bilateral femoral fractures, probable pelvic fracture..."_

 _"Imaging?"_

 _"No chance."_

 _"I need imaging. This is a bleed. She needs a craniotomy."_

 _"Nope. Look at her liver. It's shredded."_

 _"That liver's surgical..."_

 _"That livers a ten hour surgery abdominal surgery minimum even if you can save her brain, we can't tie up an OR for that long on one, iffy patient. BLACK TAG HER."_

 _"But..."_

 _"NOW, princess. Black tag her, walk it off for thirty seconds, and go to the next patient."_

 _"But..."_

 _But then, from further down the hall. "Harper, you free? I need a surgical consult."_

 _And then….._

... it was September 4th, 2155 and Travis Mayweather and Andy Ayodele were looking down at her in shock. "You okay? What the hell..."

"Monette Fortier."

"What? Who? Please don't tell me you hit your head."

"I think I'm fine,"Alice replied. She wiped her face, pinching the bridge of her nose when she saw blood on her fingers. " Andy, before, you said telepathic?"

"Yeah. Why?"

Alice clambered to her feet, supported by both men, and looked over at the child who was standing a short distance away. "I think he's scared."

Andy laughed in a sharp bark. "Hell, Ally, I'M scared. You go down, and I'm the closest thing to a doctor around here."

"That's a scary thought for all of us," Travis agreed, relinquishing his grip on Alice's arm.

Steeling herself, Alice walked over once more and crouched down in front of the child, although this time, she positioned herself slightly beyond grabbing distance. He flinched away, regardless. "Hey, what happened to Monette, that won't happen to you. That was... that was an impossible situation. It's different now... It's... This is pointless. We need Hoshi."

* * *

Rooms away from the rest of the away team, Malcolm tried again to make sense of the morass of circuitry his initial scans had detected running through and around the six, explosive-filled, canisters lurking under the pressure plate floor. He wanted the other children and away team gone, and this kid free and within snatching distance, before he would risk further scans; he guessed, assumed in fact, that doing so would trigger the device to arm. The chancy seconds between arming and explosion were mercurial hope on which to risk your life, but those seconds had saved his life more than once, and they were better than nothing at all.

Yet, he had not nearly enough information upon which to base any sort of plan and the unseeing, slightly accusatory gaze of the child he was supposed to be helping, had promised to help, knotted his gut.

"I'll get you out soon," he promised recklessly. "Once the others are clear, I'll get you to safety."

At his words, and imaging flickered into his mind, a memory, maybe, or a compilation of them. The last chocolate, in a flavour no one liked, left languishing at the bottom of the box, ostensibly for politeness's sake, but really just unwanted. Malcolm cringed at the prospect of explain to a child, even one... no especially one reading it right from his brain, just how that child had become the life of last priority in the building.

"You're just in the wrong place at the wrong time, little one," he said softly. "It's not personal. It's not _you_." The words tasted as bitter as bile, and Malcolm refused to think about just why.

As if in response, more memories churned to the surface, but before he could make sense of the maelstrom, Malcolm was distracted by the sound of the others returning.

"Problem," Trip announced without overture. "We can't get the others out quickly either. It's going to be at least a little time. What are the chances that you can defuse that thing with an acceptable degree of risk?"

"Slim to none," Malcolm answered immediately. "Honestly, I haven't even been able to think of a way to even access it. At least not one that doesn't involve drilling up through the rock underneath, and I don't think we have that sort of time."

"No we don't," Liz agreed. "That bone infection is severe. It will spread and become septicaemia today or tomorrow." Almost reluctantly, her gaze flicked to Phlox who nodded in confirmation.

Unbidden, another memory crept into Malcolm's consciousness. A litter of puppies whelped by a neighbour's timid, wall-eyed dog. Her first, and it turned out only litter, the mother was inexperienced, and with one puppy went too far eating away it's placenta and damaging the fragile, pink-white abdomen. The pup, over the next few days, left unaided, withered and died. The words of his father echoed through Malcolm's head, "circle of life", harsh, almost taunting, trampling over his sister Madeline's throaty sobs.

"That won't happen," he murmured aloud.

"Oh, you're a doctor now?" Liz replied exasperated.

When Malcolm shook his head, wordlessly indicating he'd been talking to the child, Trip began to audibly grind his teeth.

"I'm sorry," Malcolm murmured in response to this, which didn't help at all.

Trip motioned towards the corridor curtly with his head, and while Liz and Phlox traipsed after him, Malcolm found it a palpable struggle to leave, the child's unseeing gaze burning into his back.

"I'll come back," he said, another slightly reckless promise. If ordered not to, would he? Yet another memory, of himself in Enterprise's brig, Archer's fury. But the memory wasn't so much Archer's reply about the worth of Malcolm's word, but rather the feeling that came immediately after them. Frustration twisting tightly around despair and an acerbic kernel of truth. "I will," he insisted, and forced himself out the door with the others.

"Okay," Trip said wearily. "We can't safely open the pods, we can't defuse the bomb. What can we do?"

"We can maybe trick the pressure sensor. Walk on the floor."

"How?"

"The detonating mechanism is hopelessly complicated even if we could access it. But the pressure plate itself is connected into it by a very simple transducer. It's hard wired in, but if we can find a wireless way to replace the electrical signal from the transducer, we can walk over there, cut the tether, and evacuate, leaving the detonating mechanism none the wiser."

Trip grimaced. "Almost sounds too easy, doesn't it? I mean, what the fuck _IS_ any of this?"

There was no answer, easy or otherwise, and the others met this bald statement of the wrongness that surrounded them with something like a silent resentment that it had been voiced at all. Even Malcolm's glib reply - "If you think it's that easy, Commander, perhaps you'd like to volunteer to do the honours?" - fell falsely, flat and leaden.

Ultimately, Trip pressed on. "Alright. So drill through the floor in front of the pressure plate. Set up a... what? Modified Electrolaser? Disconnect the..."

"No. We can't physically disconnect the pressure plate, that's bound to be another detonation trigger. What the electrolaser will need to do is correct the transducer signal so it's reading in the correct range regardless of what is actually happening on the plate."

"Fine. Set up the electolaser. Then once the plate is safe to walk on, Phlox or Liz can..."

"No," Malcolm interrupted again. " _Safe to walk on_ is a pipe dream. The electrolaser is only going to be able to compensate for very slight shifts in weight at a time and..."

"And so I'll be careful," Liz fumed. "I'm not exactly clumsy, I'll have you know. I have more than twelve years of classical ballet training and..."

She was cut off by a barking laugh from Trip, flavoured liberally with jaded despair.

Before things could deteriorate, Malcolm interceded firmly. "You are missing my point Liz. It WON'T be safe. Which means, we clear the area as much as possible. Which means, one person. Which means, _me_. Because, if the electro-laser fails, then the bomb will arm. If that child isn't free, then whoever is here will have to be instantly prepared to run. To leave a child to die alone. And I don't think ballet class prepared you for that. I don't think _any_ of you can do that."

"Can _YOU_ do that?" Trip asked darkly.

Slowly, Malcolm met his friend's eyes. "With all due respect, Commander, I think this day will go more easily if we all refrain from questioning each other's professionalism."

* * *

Hoshi's rapid, incessant pulse all but overwhelmed her ear drums. Panic attack, she thought numbly, staring down at her screen, at Harper's succinct, but increasingly dogged messages insisting that she report to Sickbay, immediately, to facilitate treatment of a telepath.

I'm having a panic attack.

It was important that she keep telling herself that it was a panic attack, because she felt like she was dying, and, if she looked half as bad as how she felt, she would be ordered to Sickbay the moment Archer caught sight of her.

 _Telepath._

Another message, swathed in only a very thread-bare patience, pinged onto the screen. Hoshi estimated that in another twenty minutes, she was going to get a personal tutorial in the legendary Scottish Vituperative Vernacular; she suspected, in fact, that there might already have been an outbreak of it behind her back.

 _Tell her you can't._

Harper was a reasonable woman, or at least an _ethical_ one. And as an ethical woman - an ethical _doctor_ \- surely she wouldn't attempt to _force_ Hoshi into a room with a telepath. She might even try to help should Archer or T'Pol make the attempt.

But that would break Hoshi's uneasy, unspoken truce with Sickbay. The truce where she took the minimum medication that she would get away with. The truce where she pretended that she would tell them if she had any breakthrough symptoms. And the one where, in return, they pretended that Hoshi was okay. That she could still do her job. That she was _mended_.

But a _telepath_...

but another _thing_ inside her brain...

She had been- still was, really- claustrophobic, but the terror of tight spaces, of crowds, of close quarters, was nothing against the terror of things climbing into her own mind. Of not even that space remaining hers alone.

 _And it kept happening_.

An involuntary moan slipped through her mouth and Hoshi only realised it had come from her just in time to cover it with a coughing fit. The coughing pantomime broke Hoshi's lifeline of rhythmic breathing, and for a moment, she actually saw stars.

"Are you okay, Hoshi?" Archer was looking at her with concern, and also, Hoshi suspected, a sense of déjà vu.

"Fine, sir," Hoshi answered, appalled at her unsteady voice. "Sickbay needs me to try to communicate with the child. Apparently, he needs some sort of procedure."

Archer stared at her, his expression filled with indisputable concern. For a moment, Hoshi thought he might recognise her discomfort and deliver some pretence that would save her. Hoped he would. _Pleaded_ with him silently.

"Okay," Archer replied at length. "You look a little pale though. Maybe grab a bite to eat first? Did you skip breakfast?"

She had skipped breakfast, Hoshi realised and realised too that she was in danger of tears. Travis. Her day had started so hopefully. On the trailing edge of that thought came a third realisation that Travis was in Sickbay. Maybe he could help.

Forlorn hope though it seemed, it was enough to propel her off the bridge, without her legs fully collapsing beneath her. Every step on the way to E deck was slightly shorter than the last, but it was still not long at all until she was wrestling herself through sickbay's doors.

Travis was there, as was Harper, looking more relieved than impatient after all, an unconscious but apparently stable Fabrecia Boschmann, an arcticly-toned boy, and an armed security guard.

Hoshi directed her attention away from the two occupants she could not bear to look at, toward the other three. "Why is security here?" she asked.

Travis might have noted how high and tight her voice sounded because his welcoming smile dissolved into concern.

Harper however, fiddling with Boschmann's fluid line, answered breezily. "I had a small, unexpected, telepathic event with the little lad here earlier. And what with the _Treleishkah Protocols_ , I believe that Ensign Mendelman is here to put me down like a rabid badger should I turn even the slightest bit doolally."

Mendelman's lips thinned slightly. "Apologies, ma'am."

"Oh it's quite alright," Harper answered with a surprisingly lovely smile. "Back in San Francisco I had a team of residents who followed me around with, I suspect, roughly the same function. Sure, I was _allegedly_ teaching them, but..."

As Mendelman and Harper tranquilly needled each other, Hoshi locked eyes with Travis pleadingly. Get me out of this, she mouthed, I can't.

"... and you'd only be stunned and carted off to the brig, anyway, ma'am. The Lieutenant would be very irked if I actually killed you," Mendelman finished, exasperated.

Harper laughed. "I suppose Malcolm would indeed be very put-out by a failure of his _much ballyhooed_ stun-setting. So Hoshi, can we get started please? I really need to begin treatment, but..."

Travis cut in, eyes still locked on Hoshi's. "Actually Alice, I've just remembered. Crewman Baird is the resistant expert in telepathic communication. I think we should get him down here, instead."

"Really? _Baird_? An _expert_?" Alice asked, voice flatly sceptical.

"Yes," Hoshi answered, weakly.

"And, you've just remembered this now, Travis?"

"Yep."

For a moment, Hoshi found herself locked in Harper's penetrating green glare. A confession, a plea, was just rising to her lips when...

"Alright then, let's summon Mr Baird. Could you do the honours please, Hoshi? Time is a factor, and I seem quite unable to strike terror into the hearts of men today. At least based on how many times Mr Mendelman has seen fit to call me 'ma'am' in the last two minutes."

Mendelman's mouth quirked. "Sorry, ma'am."

"Aye 'right. Irritate the trauma surgeon. No reason someone in a dangerous job like security would want to stay on my good side..."

Mouthing desperate thanks to Travis, Hoshi all but fell over her feet exiting the room. "I'll just go get Baird now," she called over her shoulder.

Back in the corridor, Hoshi leaned against a bulkhead sucking in heady gulps of air.

 _Telepath..._


	10. Chapter 10

"Could you see the 'pod wreckage on the latest scans?" The captain asked, even as he arrived in junction F56-R. His almost frantic tension was so obvious to several of T'Pol's senses that she was momentarily to overwhelmed to speak. The air he brought with him reeked tinnishly of adrenaline, and the pounding of his heart valves had taken on the mushy timbre which she had noted on several recent occasions of severe stress. She had been meaning to, and had unaccountably neglected, to mention this to Phlox.

"Yes Captain. The force of the impact was mitigated by the approach angle which Ensign Boschmann was able to assume before the emergency beam out. The 'pod should be recoverable and amenable to repair. Has the ensign recovered consciousness?"

The captain shook his head. "Not yet. Harper seems cautiously optimistic though, and she's yet to break out her skull saw, so that's got to be a good sign."

"And the child?"

"Requires treatment, but more or less healthy. Did you get more seismic readings?"

T'Pol nodded "This round of seismic activity has diminished, however the area is unstable. It is difficult to predict when another round might begin. As such, the away team may require access to a evacuation accouterments, and with no shuttle on the surface, they've no way to seek assistance from Enterprise. Captain, I seek your permission to take Shuttlepod One to Epsilon Legato."

"Denied, T'Pol," he said gently.

"Captain, I strongly urge you to reconsider. They..."

Captain Archer held up his hands. "I'm sending the 'pod. I'm reluctant while we don't know why the first one crashed, but I've just talked to Hess and she's just as agitated about using the transporter in anything but the direst emergency. But, it's going to be Travis, not you. You aren't medically cleared."

Something, some...

 _ragefearlongingfrustrationlossportendingneedsomethingiswrong_

...thing too big to name tightened every muscle in T'Pol's body.

"With respect, Captain, my condition is merely one of pain. Pain which may be conquered by a sufficiently disciplined mind. Dr Phlox has erred by taking precautionary measures unnecessary for a Vulcan patient. You know me well enough to be certain that I would not risk the safety of...of the away team, were I not capable of the task."

"T'Pol, it will be Travis," Archer replied firmly. "We don't know why Boschmann lost control, and he's our best pilot."

"Then I should accompany Ensign Mayweather..."

" _Lieutenant_ Mayweather."

"...Lieutenant Mayweather to the surface. Only I can..."

"T'Pol, just a few months ago I nearly lost you to the recovery of an abandoned medical kit. I'm not going to..."

"You _MUST_ let me go!" The shock of T'Pol's shout was only deepened by the silence that followed it.

Resuming, Archer's voice was low. "...The decision is made. You will have to take up your away mission status with Phlox at a later time." He punctuated it with a rare, reproving 'Commander' and an abrupt exit from the junction.

Alone and unobserved, T'Pol permitted herself to sink to the floor.

* * *

It had taken a full three quarters of Travis's currently available discipline to not follow Hoshi out of Sickbay. He wanted more than anything to be sure she was okay. He counted the seconds until he could plausibly follow under the guise of himself seeking the unfortunate Crewman Baird.

"What was that with you and Hoshi just now?" Alice asked suddenly, as though reading his thoughts.

More creepily still, the child, recently deposited on a biobed, turned his head as if also interested in the answer.

Unsettled, Travis was fully prepared to tell a certain ginger harridan to mind her own business when his gaze snagged on Fabrecia and, unplanned, a different truth tumbled out.

"I slept with Hoshi..."

Alice raised an eyebrow

"...And I'd appreciate it if you don't tell Fabrecia. She deserves to hear it from me."

"Are you being serious?" Alice asked, incredulously. " _Of course_ I'm not going to tell Fabrecia. Why the hell would I even _want_ to do that?"

"You're her friend, aren't you?" Travis snapped crossly, hands folded across his chest.

"Her friend? Sure. Yours too, actually, for my part. But, I dinnae want a piece of this _sgudal_. Couldn't tell, even if I wanted to, actually..."

"Why not?"

"Sit down, Lieutenant."

"What the fuck are you...?"

"SIT."

Glaring, Travis did so.

Once he had, Alice did too, lowering her voice, with a quick glance at the child resting on the biobed, and Travis's jilted girlfriend. "Let me ask you this, Travis. Last month or so... have you been bothered by thoughts about what happened with Wendall? Troubled by any strong images?"

"Alice," Travis growled a warning.

"Ever feel like it's happening again? Having dreams about it? Trouble sleeping? Jumpy? Angry? Short with people?"

"Alice..."

"Feel pressure in your chest when something random reminds you? Avoiding using knives in the mess hall?"

"SHUT UP."

Alice didn't so much as blink. "Travis, you have been avoiding this diagnosis with ingenuity and zeal for quite a few months now, but..."

"Hoshi is NOT a symptom," Travis hissed, voice hoarse. "I've been in love with her for years."

"Aye, right? But I guess what I'm asking is, had you been 'in love with her for years' _before_ yesterday?"

Rage drove Travis to his feet, but then cooled almost immediately into something more caustic. "Yes, it's been years. You aren't the only person capable of nursing a crush."

Alice sighed, standing up more slowly. "And what are we talking about now?"

"You made a birthday card."

Alice rolled her eyes. "Again with the bleeding birthday card! I've got a friend who's a cultural anthropologist. I'm going to pitch him this deep space obsession with birthday card provenience as a research paper, because it is quite the phenomenon! I apologise for interfering, Lieutenant. Handle your affairs as you see fit."

After administrating a meaningful look, Alice wandered over to a cluster of tanks and cages and began peering through them, leaving Travis standing somewhat awkwardly alone. "I'm sorry," he said suddenly, unsure why.

Alice answered without looking up from her search. "You don't owe me any apologies Travis. Unless we're all apologising for snark, now. And if we are, I'll never get done with apologising to people."

"You have shitty personal boundaries, you know that?"

Alice tipped a cage forward to look behind it. "Travis, I don't think I even know what 'personal boundaries' _are_."

"Of course you don't," Travis replied tiredly. "But I do. Because I was raised on a cargo ship with only a handful of people whereas you were...what? Raised by wolves on a moor?"

"Well, you're half right..." Alice replied, now pawing through a cupboard.

"I mean, you do realise that I have had your guitar since April? I borrowed it without asking you, and you haven't asked for it back once, and... what the hell are you looking for anyway?"

"Lyssarian Desert Larva," she answered without looking up. "Sort of pearly white? Looks a bit like a slimy skein of yarn?"

Yet another set of unpleasant memories spumed in Travis's decidedly unquiet mind. "We don't have one. Don't you read the medical records?" he replied sharply.

"Manifest says we do have one" Alice mused, undeterred. "And it's exactly the sort of thing Phlox would be bound to have somewhere. And yes... _of course_ I read the medical records. And virtually all printed words in my general vicinity. If the breakfast cereal came in packets, I would read the cereal packets. If I ate cereal, that is, and..."

Travis swallowed "What do you want it for?"

"I'm not going to sic it on you, if that's what you're worried about," Alice answered, then caught his eye. "I've had some test results come through, and the kid here... well...I don't think this thing is what we thought it was."

"Tell me."

Half-way through the explanation, Captain Archer commed to order Travis to the launch bay.

"Actually sir," Travis swalloed. "I think you might need to hear this first."

* * *

"Don't know where Boschmann's got to," Trip muttered unhappily as Malcolm raided the tools the engineer had brought with him.

"Take the others and wait outside, regardless," Malcolm suggested, firmly. "Thin air is a damned sight better than exploding air." What Malcolm was actually thinking, as he regarded Trip's increasingly tight expression, was that dealing with _one_ unexploded bomb at a time was quite enough.

Still, Trip lingered. As he cautiously drilled through the floor, Malcolm was pondering a line between assertiveness and insubordination when Trip, apparently finishing whatever argument he was having with himself, straightened abruptly shepherded the others out of the room. There was a final look, as he left, which Malcolm could not quite read. _Be careful_ , certainly, but something else as well. Malcolm forced it from his mind. Either there would be time to figure it out later, or whatever was beyond 'be careful' didn't matter.

Alone, the portable lamp rested on the floor, Malcolm found himself glad the eerily quiet child couldn't see. The shadows were long and strange, and would not be encouraging to a small child. His eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark and he could now easily make out the small figure, including the protruding arm bone, ringed with clotted blue blood.

"That must hurt," Malcolm murmured, and then almost doubled over from a sudden nova of pain exploding in his mind. It was gone a second later, and gasping for air, Malcolm heard a strained whimper, and looked over at the child, huddled and somehow radiating apology.

"That's alright," he said gently. "Don't worry about it. Only. do please try not to do it again. At least, not without some sort of warning. This is delicate work I'm doing here and it would be best if..." Unsure if any of this was translating telepathically, he trailed off.

The hole he had drilled was well placed, and it was the work of only a few minutes to position and aim the electro-laser. The instrument in question was a relatively weak but superbly precise member of its class, capable of blocking and taking over the transmission between transducer and detonator, in tiny increasing increments, within a range of variation dwarfed by that produced by a child scramblings.

"I hope Starfleet will buy Trip a new laser," he quipped absently. "I doubt he still has the receipt."

His answer was a brief mewling squeak, and then a giant, almost cartoonishly bubbled question mark formed in his head.

Malcolm was not quite able to suppress a short peal of laughter. "You really shouldn't listen to half of what I say, let alone what I think. It's all nonsense."

Nonsense. A memory. His father shouting the word like a clap of thunder.

His laughter withered.

"It's going to be alright," he said aloud.

Another mewling squeak followed and Malcolm lifted his hands clear of the laser in anticipation. His head filled with a shuffle of images of Madeline, happy ones, and also of the other Aenar boy, he who was safely on Enterprise.

"You'll be together again," Malcolm said, adding to his increasing list of fast and loose promises.

Another squeak, and this time an image of Trip appeared in Malcolm's head, saying "Can YOU do that?"

Malcolm floundered for an answer. When he settled on one - "I won't leave you."- he refused to examine it too closely.

Another squeak. Another memory. This time it was of a window, Malcolm wasn't sure from where, flung open wide.

A request.

One Malcolm met with extreme reluctance, and profoundly unsure why he was doing it at all.

Setting everything down, he completely opened his mind and...

 _...it was long ago, before days had names, and he was in agony. Pain was overwhelming all sensory input and Fear was clawing up Pain's back pushing it into the grey below. From amid the scramble, the panic, a few particulars rose and fell, a few_ technicalities _. His arm twisted behind his back, a snapping, someone screaming. Pressure. Blows raining down and..._

...it was September 4th, 2155 and he was struggling for breath in a dark room next to a child and an unexploded bomb.

"That never happened," he wheezed. _Had it?_ He _had_ had a broken arm as a child. He'd found a picture once at his aunts of himself, very young, his arm in a thin zephyr-splint cast. Unable to remember, he'd asked. That... _whatever it was_... didn't match the story told at all. "That wasn't _me_. Was that _you_?"

The child mewled softly, but all that followed was an image of the two of them together, now, in the room.

Malcolm sucked in more breaths, but the disorientation, the sickly grey sinking feeling in his head grew worse not better. When he noticed drops of blood appearing on the floor beneath his face, he was only capable of a very dull alarm. "I think I had better lie down for a minute," he said softly, already doing so, already resting his head on the somehow pleasant cool of the floor.

There was no answer at all.


	11. Chapter 11

At Travis's summons, Jon strode into sickbay, casting a concerned eye towards the still unconscious figure of Fabrecia Boschmann, before joining Travis and, perhaps not surprisingly given the venue, Alice Harper.

"What is it Travis? I assume it's important?"

Travis nodded to Alice. "Tell him what you just told me."

Alice gave him an odd look. "Well...alright. Um...The child is, as we expected Aenar, but not...not entirely so."

"I'm not following."

"The information available on the Aenar is quite limited, as you know, and I'm not anywhere near the equal of Phlox when it comes to genetics, but, as best I can tell, they have transgenic sequences in their genomes."

"So, they were genetically modified after they were kidnapped..."

"Actually, that's just it; I don't think they ever _were_ kidnapped. I think they've been _made_."

" _Made…_?You mean...?"

"Grown... _cloned_ , sort of. Bear with me. There are these things called Lyssarian Desert Larvae. We're supposed to have one in the menagerie according to the manifest, actually. I was going to rustle it up to show you, but it turns out I can't find it anywhere... I think maybe it might have died in the Expanse? That seems to be about when Phlox stopped getting food supplies for it...And I can see why Phlox wouldn't have necessarily _reported_ it dead because the Lyssarian Prime Conclave are SUPER touchy about what people do with them, because while their primary medical use is to produce topical antiviral treatments, you can also use them to make clones."

Jon locked eyes with Travis over Alice's shoulder.

Oblivious, Alice continued. "So, the reason I mention this, is that this child is _primarily_ genetically Aenar, but appears to have, not exactly _genes_ from another species, but genes from another species sort of translated into Aenar/Andorian nucelotidic biochemisty. And, there are several epigenetic and mitrochondrial markers which suggest that they were grown using Lyssarian Desert Larva. Now these larvae, they are sort of white, about this big..."

"Yes, I think I remember that thing," Jon interrupted sharply. "And yes, I believe it _did_ die in the Expanse. Tell me more about these non-Aenar genes."

Alice blinked. "Really? That's the part you find interesting? Not the clone larvae? Alright... Erm, yes. There are sequences which look nothing like any Andorian _or_ Aenar which we have on file."

"What do you think they are?"

"Well, that's the thing. They look sort of... Vulcan."

"Vulcan?"

"Aye. I'd want Phlox to double check it, but, best I can tell, the sequences are cribbed from the Vulcan genome."

"So what you're saying is you think that these children were never taken from Andoria at all, but instead are transgenic clones made from Aenar and Vulcan DNA..."

"And using Lyssarian Desert Larvae, yes. Now, I hate to keep dragging things back to the apparently very boring clone larvae, but this is important; I haven't told you the worst part yet. This boy, and presumably the others, is likely no older than a few days old and short of a miracle, won't live beyond another ten and change and...you don't look shocked. Why aren't you more shocked? Am I not explaining this properly, or are you just really impressively jaded? Somebody is _MAKING PEOPLE_ , using them for their own purposes, and then just throwing them away. Who the hell _does_ something like that?"

"Somebody who thinks they have a good reason," Jon replied dully.

"Well, when it comes to reasons, you are on your own, because I've no idea. Whoever it was has gone to a lot of trouble, though. As I mentioned, the Lyssarian Prime Conclave are not prone to largesse with respect to these Larva."

"Pilots for Drone ships," Travis put in, eyes still locked on Jon's. " _Has to be_. Could some quantity of Larva have been stolen from Lyssaria without our knowing about it? Enough to start breeding them, maybe?"

Alice shrugged. "Normally, I'd say we'd be able to hear the Conclave howling about it from here, vacuum of space notwithstanding. But... they've pretty much cut off all diplomatic contact with Coalition worlds since the _Treleishkah_ incident. They don't want to risk subspace contact with us. So I suppose it is _possible_ that such a theft might have occurred without it becoming public knowledge to the rest of the galaxy."

"Okay, thanks Alice. Can you excuse us for a moment?"

"But, this is my office," Alice replied, brow furrowed. "Well, _Phlox's_ but, you know…"

From somewhere, Jon summoned a smile. "And it's my ship. Go get a coffee or stare moodily at your patients or something."

When she was gone, Travis exhaled. "So, that happened. And how the hell does she not know about Sim, anyway? Does she not read the medical records? Do we have to worry about this?"

"Phlox changed them somehow, I believe," Jon replied. "Altered them so she's know enough to treat Trip if the situation called for it, but not expose the full extent of what happened with Sim."

Travis raised his eyebrows. "Do I know the full extent of what happened with Sim?"

"No, you don't," Jon replied softly. "Not you, not even Phlox, and certainly not Trip. Nobody but me. And it's better if it stays that way. Pilots for drone ships, you said."

"Sure," Travis replied scathingly. "If you can't kidnap more Aenar, you just grow them right? Much easier."

Jon shrugged uncertainly. "What do you think the Vulcan DNA is for? T'Pol didn't have much luck with it. Wrong sort of telepathy I guess."

"I don't know. Maybe they want to try to figure out how to make telepresence work with Vulcans? And these kids are some sort of intermediate research phase?"

"Why though? It's not like Vulcans would be any easier to kidnap or any easier to compel to fly drone ships than the Aenar are. They're our closest ally."

Travis could only shrug.

Jonathan Archer straightened. "I need you to take Shuttlepod One down to the planet Travis, get the away team and the rest of these… children." He paused, as if undecided then inclined his head in the direction of Fabrecia. "Are you okay to do that? Should I ask somebody else? I want you flying that 'pod because you're our best pilot, and we don't know what wrecked the first 'pod. We need a 'pod on the ground. We're entirely out of contact with the away team until we have one, but if I'm asking too much of you, _tell me_."

Travis pulled himself to his full height, and stuck out his chin. "I'm at your command, sir. Ready for any order."

"Of course you are," Jon answered, and clapped him on the shoulder for good measure.

But the damage was done.

* * *

Face unreadable, Trip stared at the sky. "Where in the blue blazes has Boschmann got to? She take a detour via Kronos or something?"

Her feet shifting in the grey clay-dust, Liz tried to catch Phlox's eye, but if the doctor had picked up on of their commanding officer's corroding mood, he showed no sign of it now. They stood, huddled, a distance out onto the barren plane, well clear of the shadow of the aracnoid dome. The thin air discouraged conversation, but the tension made the silence unbearable.

"This is ridiculous," Liz exclaimed. "That whole temple to monstrosity is a powder keg and Lieutenant Reed is in there playing with matches. We NEED to get those other kids out of there."

From Trip, her assessment elicited no more than an irritated huff. Phlox, on the other hand was aghast.

"Even if it kills, or permanently injures them?"

Liz was uncowed. "We have no REASON to think that will happen. At least, not nearly so much reason as to think that being in a huge freaking explosion will kill or permanently injure them."

"The two situations are not comparable," Phlox muttered crossly, and, to Liz's mind, condescendingly as well. "In one scenario we would be purposefully and ignorantly, subjecting them to unknown risks, in the other, although lamentable, we would be merely failing to save them from a situation not of our making."

And Liz, standing on a cold and lifeless landscape, beset by the image of rows of despoiled pods, each cradling a tragedy, saw red. "That is so much patron bullshit I'm amazed we aren't up to our chins in it. There's no difference. THEY WOULD BE JUST AS DEAD! It's puerile hair-splitting to pretend otherwise."

A wave of stiffness shuddered through Phlox's posture. It was somehow very alien. "I have devoted a great deal of my life to the puerile hair-splitting of the ethics of life and death, Crewman. And if you wish to pursue a career as a medic..."

"You think I WANT that? I'm an ENTOMOLOGIST. I have a goddamn PhD! Do you think I want to give that up, to hand you bandages and mop your brow in surgery? I DON'T WANT a career as as your medic, or one as a nurse or doctor for that matter, and if I did? I wouldn't need your help, or your patronising philosophising, to do it."

Her words lingered in the air between them.

"You know," Trip mused, still staring at the sky. "It's a good thing that the air is no thin here, that it doesn't carry sound that great. Because otherwise, I might have heard you two having an incredibly unprofessional domestic in what is, despite Boschmann's baffling indolence, is a hostile alien environment and not, in fact, a bus stop."

As he spoke, a speck in the sky caught the light. "Finally!" Trip added. "I don't suppose one of the two of you would like to start translating 'Frankensteinian nightmare fuel' into Morse code for me? Because, this is going to be one hell of a report, and... that's 'Pod One? Why did she take time out to switch to 'Pod One? What is wrong with everyone today?"

"A mechanical fault in the other shuttlepod might explain the delay," Phlox offered, his tone still stiff.

"Mechanical fault, my ass. My 'pods are perfect," Trip said frowning at the approaching pod.

With rising disquiet, the three waited while the approaching 'pod took a long approach, unexpectedly circling over the distant mountains, before finially landing about twenty metres away. It was not Boschmann who emerged.

"Travis!" Trip exclaimed. "What the heck happened to 'Pod Two? And Boschmann for that matter."

"Accident," Travis replied springing out of the pod, causing a small spray of clay dust to rise and fall in the still air. "Uncontrolled landing over in the mountain range."

Trip cursed, eyes widening. "She okay? The kid?"

"In sickbay. We transported them out."

"You used the transporter?"

Travis's lips thinned. "We had too. We were lucky to be in time, actually. No damn idea why she lost control. The whole way down I was expecting to hit some sort of ionic disturbance or unstable air or something but..."

"The kid."

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

Trip exhaled furiously. "The goddamn kid. I bet it was the kid. They don't talk. Telepaths. We'd not been here two minutes before that one slithered into Malcolm's head and he all but..."

"Sir... where is Malcolm?"

"Inside."

Baffled, Travis looked over at Liz and Phlox for confirmation. "You left _Malcolm_ in charge of a bunch of traumatised telepathic kids?"

"I left Malcolm in charge of the goddamn unexploded bomb."

Travis took a step backwards "A _BOMB_?"

"Yeah, a goddamn bomb!" Trip exclaimed throwing up his hands. "What? Boschmann didn't tell you?"

"She's unconscious."

" _What_? You said she was okay."

"I said she was in _sickbay_ ," Travis snapped back. "There's a bomb? You left five kids inside with a bomb?"

Liz held her breath as Travis and Trip stared at each other. Travis was perilously close to even Trip's unusually tolerant definition of insubordination.

However, while obviously bristling, Trip's reply was calm. "Yes. There are kids inside. But now that the pod is back, we are going to get four of them out."

Beside Liz, Phlox drew in a breath of protest, but then released it, unspent.

Travis frowned. "Four? Aren't there five?"

"Fifth kid's sitting on the trigger," Trip replied shortly. "We got a diamond-drill bit in this pod? Cause otherwise I'm going to need you to fly out to the wreckage or back to Enterprise to get one."

"There's one in this pod."

"Good. Set her up." Trip nodded, reaching for his communicator. "Malcolm, I need a sit rep. We're going to start extracting the other kids soon so it might be best if you...Malcolm? You there...?"

His words were met only with the looming stillness of the dome.

The pressure in Liz's chest began to increase. "Maybe he's got his hands full?" she offered, her voice little more than a wheeze. She had meant some complex, delicate procedure that could not been interrupted to reach for his communicator, but somehow the words sounded far more ominous.

"I'll go in and check," Trip answered shortly, a shade paler than a moment ago.

Travis stepped forward. "I'm going too."

"Travis..."

"Sir..."

Trip blinked first. "Fine. Your funeral," he said, and Liz heard herself gasp. The words were like ice.

* * *

Shortly after Travis had departed sickbay, Crewman Baird had arrived, told Jon that Lieutenant Sato was headed for the bridge and then proceeded to try to communicate with the pallid Aenar child using spoken Andorian. There was no outward sign that the child was paying any attention to Baird whatsoever.

Catching a furtive eyeroll from Alice, as she briefly hovered over Boschmann, Jon walked over to her.

"Poor lad has probably never heard a word of spoken Andorian in his life," she muttered softly at his approach.

"We'd do better with Hoshi," Jon replied, thinking of what had happened with the inscrutable Tarquin, left to his fate in the Expanse.

Alice frowned. "Well, I did try, but it wasn't the best idea. The lad takes a lot of liberties with his telepathy. Not his fault of course, how could he know better? But, on reflection? After all she's been through? Hoshi would be second to last on my list of who should have to deal with this."

"Just one slot above Baird you mean?" Jon joked weakly, casting an eye over the hapless crewman. "I could ask T'Pol..."

But Alice, aggressively sorting through suture kits in search of the one see needed, shook her head. "Actually, Commander T'Pol is dead last on the aforementioned list."

"Why?"

" _Really?_ Why is she last person who should have to deal with an ailing, artificially created, part Vulcan child? Although, I suppose I should say she ties for last..."

Bitterly, Jon shook his head. "Yeah. You aren't wrong are you? I didn't even think about Elizabeth. If I didn't know better, I would swear somebody was messing with us. I'm sorry about the armed guard, by the way."

"It's fine."

"It's not that I don't..."

Alice shrugged. "The guard doesn't bother me. Really."

Jon believed her. Whatever was responsible for the unusual clatter the doctor was making preparing for the upcoming procedure, it wasn't Mendelman. Or even Baird's futile endeavours. "Did you mean what you said before?" he asked suddenly.

"About what?"

"About using the Lyssiarian Dessert Larvae. About cloning being..."

"Monstrous? It's not the cloning _per se_...it's... people aren't things. They aren't solutions to problems, or weapons, or spare parts. I realise that tolerating other cultures, even enemy ones, is the _attitude du jour_ around here, but... making children in order to win a war? I'm judging the hell out of _that_. It's depraved."

Long enough ago, Jon might have agreed, would have agreed, but he couldn't. He felt a pair of eyes watching him. Eyes exactly like Trip's, but NOT Trip's; eyes long closed by death. "How about doing it to prevent a war? If there was no other way? If the Earth depended on it?"

Alice sighed distractedly. "Is there some hypothetical, somewhere, where it's the least worst option? Oh, I don't know, maybe? Maybe sometimes there ARE only unconscionable choices. But _this_? This is wrong. And I'd say the same if it were our side doing it. And so would you."

 _Our side_ , Jon thought grimly. _Again, the shadow of war_. Aloud he said, "Probably. Although I understand I am really impressively jaded these days." Neither the smile he offered, nor the one he received in return, was honest.

Jon then turned his attention to Baird, still being roundly ignored by the ghostly child on the biobed. "Get a name yet, Crewman?"

"No sir, nothing," Baird admitted unhappily.

Nodding in both acknowledgement and dismissal Jon took Baird's place. The child's unseeing eyes, so similar the Aenar Jon had met, to Lissan's, to Jhamel's, rested near, but not quite on his face, "My name is Jonathan," he said. "We only want to help you and your friends, but you need to try, okay? You need to help us."

As if he had understood, the child hesitantly lifted ghostly fingers towards Jon's face. Cautiously encouraged, Jon leaned forward to meet them and...

 _... and it was almost two years ago, months into the expanse, into the frantic, soul destroying search for the Xindi. Jon was haunted, hunted, all but dead inside, and a man stood before him. A man desperate to live. A man Jon would kill and eulogise later. Wallpapering over murder with talk of sacrifice. A man with his friend's face._

 _And he heard the words. The words burnt into his soul too deeply. The words that would supporate there - hated, but ultimately unregretted - until the day Jon died._

 _Words of desperation and despair; words of necessity._

 _"I must complete this mission! And to do that I need Trip! Trip! I'll take whatever steps necessary to save him."_

 _"Even if it means killing me?"_

 _"Even if it means killing you."_

... and it was September 4th, 2155, and Jon was lying on the floor of sickbay, a child screaming a piercing, otherworldly scream, somewhere above his head.

Faces were looking down at him. Ayodele, Mendelmen. Ayodele was shouting for Dr Harper.

"What the hell is this, now?" Jon heard Alice's voice, asking, felt her running footsteps on the deck.

"Sim," he whispered when he saw her face.

Alice looked at him uncomprehendingly. "What's ' _Sim'_?" she asked Ayodele. "What does he mean?"

Ayodele blinked at her, distractedly. "Don't you read the medical records?"

This pulled Alice up short for a moment, but then she visibly shook it away. "Never mind. Captain? Can you hear me? Do you know where you are?"

Jon did, but found himself unable to speak at that moment. Found himself unable to focus on anything but that unearthly screaming. He shifted his head in discomfort when Alice shone a harsh light into each of his eyes, while speaking rapidly to her audience.

"Ben, go to Junction F56-R, and fetch Commander T'Pol. I promise not to turn homicidal 'til you get back. Andy, try and settle the little one, will ye? Captain, I need you to answer me. Captain...? Jonathan...?"

The pen light moved, but the glare in Jon's eyes didn't diminish. Rather, it grew brighter and the room began to fade away, the voices fading and garbling into a hum.

Everything, but that sharp, unyielding shriek.


	12. Chapter 12

Passing through the slight shadow of one of the dome's spinneret-like towers, Travis tried to swallow the lump in his throat. It refused to stay swallowed. They were walking towards a bomb. On purpose. And unlike when he had accidently encountered one in the embassy on Vulcan, help from Enterprise was more than a communicator call away. Almost meditatively he pondered the steps between them and an emergency beam out. Call to pod, translation into Morse, transmission of Morse to Enterprise, relay of message to transporter room, beam out. And apart from Hoshi's part of the chain, he could not count on any of that happening with peak efficiency.

Altogether, it seemed like far too many seconds for comfort. And why? Fucking _Treleishkah_ , that was why. Unable to trust sensors, to trust subspace, to trust audio transmissions, they were all that much further from safety.

 _Unable to trust each other..._

Trip was striding towards the dome with the air of one on the verge of panic. It seemed that even as every one of Travis's instincts were screaming at him to slow down, approach cautiously, every one of Trip's was causing him to speed up. And instinct or no, Travis's pride forced him to keep pace with his commanding officer. With Trip, who seemed to loath command, preferring to putter about with the ship's systems. With Trip, who had abdicated responsibility command responsibility to Travis during the _Treleishkah_ incident, and had scarcely bothered to look up from his precious conduits before doing so. Who had sent Travis into the hijacking crisis. Into a life or death struggle. Into disaster.

And, who had never apologised.

Report in, Malcolm, Travis thought furiously. Report in and say you're fine. More importantly, _BE_ fine, because if Trip freaks out again, I don't want to be trying to handle this - AND him - on my own.

When they arrived at the pressurising entrance chamber, Trip shot Travis a tight smile, some obliviously sardonic quip about the hissing sound of the inflowing gas, and a patronising reminder not to step on any pressure plates, and it was suddenly very hard not to punch him in his oblivious, patronising face. Even as the knuckles on his clenching fist blanched, Travis reproved himself for being unfair. But the word rang hollow, even in his own mind. _Everything_ was unfair. The blood on Travis's hands was unfair.

Travis did manage to still his hand, but his eyes burned his fury into Trip's back. _It should have been YOU, Commander. YOUR hands._

And Trip had no idea, seemed to have no thought at all for anything beyond the immediate problem. "That's it, let's go," he said briskly, as the pressure equalised and the inner door unsealed, then raised his voice to echo through the dark space beyond. "Malcolm? You okay?"

 _No idea._

Still, with no idea where he was going, Travis had no choice but to follow Trip's shadowed form as he barrelled through the labyrinthine corridors.

"Malcolm...?"

A final left turn and the site of what was beyond hit Travis like a blow to the chest. The pool of blood, and Malcolm sprawled, apparently unconscious, bare inches from the edge of the pressure plate would have been enough, but combined with the darkness and the cowering, restrained child almost brought Travis to his knees. Adrenaline poured into him. Too much. It had no focus. No directive to meet.

"How did you let this happen? What's wrong with you? _HOW_ could you leave someone alone in here?"

It was more than a shout. Almost a scream. It tore at Travis's throat leaving it raw and stung. It drew all of Trip's attention, startled and affronted. And Malcolm's eyes flew open.

* * *

Mendelman on her heels, T'Pol ran into sickbay, the muscles in her legs, weakened by repeatedly climbing between the sensor array and the analysis junction, all but collapsing after the sprint to E Deck.

The scene before her was chaotic; floor-based resuscitative activities being performed on Captain Archer and the frantically struggling child in Crewman Ayodele's arms. And the shrieking. It struck her with an impact unexplainable by either its frequency or volume.

As she recoiled, Ensign Mendelman pushed past her, collecting the struggling child from Ayodele's arms, facilitating the transfer of Captain Archer to a biobed by doctor and medic, and a few seconds later administration of a sedative hypospray to the child. Intramuscular, rather than intravenous, given the cold-adapted anatomy of the Aenar it took a few seconds for the child's struggles to still into unconsciousness.

"Sorry, Rascal. That was not ideal," Dr Harper murmured before, leaving the boy with Ayodele and returning her attention to the captain.

The situation now somewhat controlled, T'Pol permitted herself to sink into a chair. While she had hoped sickbay's staff would be to distracted to notice, they both clearly did, and her weakness would no doubt be reported to Phlox later. "Report."

"No idea, really," Harper replied shortly, rubbing her forehead. "Everyone's stable, I think. Give me a minute."

"In your own time, Doctor."

"You alright, though? Need a hypospray?"

T'Pol arched an eyebrow. "You have more pressing concerns than my discomfort."

"Not a few balls in the air, true," Harper agreed, attaching a few more monitors to both Captain Archer and the Aenar boy and relaxing slightly at what she saw on them.

"The child became distressed by Captain Archer's collapse?" T'Pol asked after a considered paused.

"Looked more like vice versa, Commander," Crewman Ayodele replied. "The child touched Captain Archer's face, started screaming a few seconds later, and then the captain sort of, keeled over."

T'Pol felt herself blink. "It was not my understanding that the Aenar are touch telepaths."

"We think... that is I think they have transgenic sequences in their genome," Dr Harper replied cautiously. "Sequences producing Vulcan proteins."

"Am I not _Enterprise_ 's Science Officer? I do not understand why I am only now receiving this information."

"I reported to Captain Archer," Dr Harper replied, slightly defensively. "That's not all there is, but the information is a little surprising and perhaps distressing and..."

"And, I am a Vulcan," T'Pol interrupted firmly. "And I am already sitting down."

Taking a slightly hitched breath, Harper launched into an explanation. It was succinct, acceptably logical and unexpectedly shredding. Illogical, she whispered silently to herself. The two events are only superficially similar. And yet the knowledge tore her buried grief from her chest as if by the teeth of wild sehlats.

"I see," she said, fearing if she did not acknowledge the information then the explanation wouldn't stop. She felt an impulse rise to rail, to insist that she should have been told earlier, despite her personal bereavement. To declaim humans as illogical and their folly responsible for all that would now unfold. But it was an impulse born of anguish, not sense, and she released it unfulfilled.

Harper watched her, regretfully. "I'm sorry."

T'Pol straightened her shoulders. "Apologising for facts is not necessary."

" _Empathy_ sorry, then, for the facts. And _contrition_ sorry for not telling you earlier. It seemed...cruel. "

Fervently desiring to bring the conversation to a close, T'Pol said something to the effect that reporting to Captain Archer had been adequate and the dissemination of the information from there had not been Harper's responsibility. Fortunately, either her words or her tone produced the desired effect and she found herself left to her thoughts, until Lieutenant Sato ran through the door, PADD in hand, pulling up short when she saw the Captain.

"I am in Command, Lieutenant," T'Pol said, noting that it took longer than expected for her presence to capture Sato's attention; the communications officer appeared preoccupied.

"We've had a message from the surface," Sato almost whispered. "There is an explosive device endangering the dome. They are working to evacuate the remaining children, but…"

 _Explosive device_.

T'Pol's breath shuddered out of her in a rush. She had been feeling…something. She should have known. She drew another breath to speak, but it took yet another before she was able. "Instruct the Lieutenant Hess to ready the transporter room for emergency evacuation of the surface."

Sato nodded, but only half turned away. T'Pol's heart constricted. Could there really be _more_?

"Commander. According to Lieutenant Hess, the transporter can only evacuate one person at a time because it's targeting scanners are isolated from the main array due to _Treleishkah Protocol_ and there are ten people on the surface."

" _Treleishkah Protocol_ must be inviolate, Lieutenant. It is a standing order of both Starfleet and the Coalition of Planets," T'Pol replied sharply, her mouth dry.

Sato hesitated, then took a small step forward. "I know Commander, but with so many people the order of the evacuation is going to matter..."

 _Not this. Not now. The universe could not demand this of her now._

"Starfleet must have an established protocol for this situation," T'Pol replied, hoping she imagined the desperation she heard tinting her voice.

"That's just it, Commander." Sato swallowed before continuing. "Under normal circumstances the protocol is to complete evacuation of civilians first. But under an elevated threat condition, the protocol is to evacuate our personnel first, in order of seniority, to facilitate survival of the ship. Are you elevating our threat condition?"

"We are under _Treleishkah Protocol_ , Lieutenant. _Surely_ that elevates our threat condition?"

Sato shook her head. "Actually it doesn't. Treat condition remains at the discretion of the Captain, and he never actually ordered it raised. As things stand now, the five children and Dr Phlox will be evacuated before our officers and Cutler. But if you raise our threat condition… I'm sorry, Commander, Lieutenant Hess will require a clear order about who to transport first if the call comes."

T'Pol met Sato's eyes, saw that the Lieutenant understood what she was asking, understood the position T'Pol was now in. Could she do it, give an order to save her… save Commander Tucker first at the expense of children? And what would happen if she did? Would the shaky Coalition with Andoria hold? And Commander Tucker, _Trip_ , could _he_ ever forgive her?

Brutally, she pushed all such thoughts from her mind. The only question at hand was whether the threat condition was elevated. What followed from that was what followed. She would do her duty. "Lieutenant Sato, the Captain has been incapacitated by an unknown and potentially hostile process. Please elevate _Enterprise_ 's threat condition accordingly."

Leadenly, Sato nodded and walked from the room, leaving T'Pol to seek out a part of herself that did not ache, to find the strength to stand.

* * *

Fabrecia groaned. Her eyelids had grown disobedient and the light was leaking in. She was in pain, in an academic sort of way. She was aware of it, could sort of sidle over to it, poke it with a stick, but it wasn't bothering her. If she turned her back on it, it went away. This, she knew, meant pain meds. Which meant she wasn't splattered on the ground. She was in some hospital somewhere.

An eyelid fell open, perhaps of its own accord. "Oh it's you," she said to the familiar face. It brought memories back. "I crashed my firetail. Derringer m.a. my wing. At Goleta..."

The face, Alice grimaced. "I'm afraid that was the last time we met like this, Bree. We're a bit further afield than Galeta. Epsilon Legato. Do you remember? Something happened with your 'pod, you were crashing. I think they transported you out after the first bounce or somesuch."

"Shuttlepod?" Fabrecia murmured, then confusion broke into a flood of memories. "Shit, the kid!"

"The kid is fine," Alice replied gently. "In fact..."

The doctor got not further, before Fabrecia was suddenly hit in the chest by 16 kilograms of rapidly breathing child, clinging to her tightly and trailing several cords which should have been plugged into monitoring equipment.

"Fantastic," Alice sighed, irritably flicking a cord. She lent forward and gently tried to prise the little boy off Fabrecia, but leapt back again, when the boy's teeth sunk into her hand. "Ah, for fack's sake, that hurt, ya little loonie. The kid, if I'm honest Bree, the kid does not like me very much. Get off her, will ye? She's hurt."

"It's okay," Fabrecia replied a little sleepily. "It doesn't hurt that much."

"Aye, well I gave you the good drugs, didn't I?" Alice replied. "Actually, though, you're lucky. Bad concussion, and you're a little banged up, but no broken bones. Wee bit of internal bleeding, but it's stopped on it's own. Although, t'would be better if a certain little rascal, who'a a little banged up himself, refrained from jumping on you. And stayed in bed, where he was put!"

Begrudgingly the little boy manoeuvered himself so that he was lying beside Fabrecia but still in her slightly ginger embrace. He then shot such a delightfully poisonous look in Alice's general direction, that Fabrecia laughed, quickly discovering her ribs were among the bruised. "Aww, you _do_ hate her, don't you, _'beestje_? What did the mean lady do to you, huh?"

"Fucking hell," Alice muttered.

Fabrecia goggled. "You can't swear in front of kids, Ally! What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Lad's psychic, and doesn't speak English, and you're high, and I'll swear all I like. Tell you what though, this is as cooperative as he's been. I'm getting Communications back down here. See if we can make some headway now you're up to helping."

"You're putting me to work already, Ally? I'm concussed. What is this, Rura Penthe?" Fabrecia smiled at the boy. "You're right, kid. She is mean."

Slowly, as if the very movement was unfamiliar, a smile formed on the boy's face.


	13. Chapter 13

Travis's unaccountable outburst had could have brought them to disaster. Would have, had Malcolm Reed's superlative situational awareness recovered a few seconds later, because, although his collapsed friend was mere centimetres from the pressure plate, Trip was to astonished by the invective to restrain him.

"Travis? WHAT THE HELL?" Trip shouted, shocked by both the attack and the near disaster. The outburst drained nearly all of Trip's anger out of him, bringing him almost to composure, but Travis, eyes widening, was obviously not done.

"ME? What the HELL is WRONG with _you_?"

"Calm down, Lieutenant," Trip replied tersely, teeth gritted.

"No, _sir_ ," Travis all but spat. "It's one thing abandoning people in the middle of a disaster to tinker with a transporter, but doing it to cool your heels outside? How a jumped up mechanic like you ever got to be..."

"If you could all stop shouting please," Malcolm interrupted, shaking from the effort. "My head is killing me," he finished, although he deliberately flicked his eyes toward the listening child.

Too baffled to even begin with Travis, Trip turned his attention to the easier prospect. "What happened? Where the hell did all this blood come from? I don't see any..."

"Nose bleed," Malcolm replied shortly, as he pulled himself to a unsteady sitting position.

"A nose bleed?" Trip echoed. " Caused all that?"

He supposed he should ask what caused it, but he already knew the answer he would get - 'I've no idea'- and also the correct answer.

 _These kids._

Still ignoring Travis for the moment, Trip helped Malcolm move to the door frame and prop himself against it. "We're going to evacuate the other four kids now," he told Malcolm. "Phlox is practically beside himself but..."

"They're still in here?" Malcolm interrupted. The loss of what little colour he had answered the question of whether he knew how nearly his return to consciousness had come to blowing them all away.

"You had enough on your mind," Trip answered slightly apologetically.

"I suppose," Malcolm acknowledged tightly. "It will work, I think. The electrolaser. But I'll not try it until the rest of you are clear."[BW1]

" _You_ won't be trying it at all."

"It was a nose bleed."

"You were _unconscious_."

"And now, I'm fine."

Trip rolled his eyes. " _Et tu_ , Malcolm? Is there a sign taped to my back saying 'Defy me?', or what?"

Malcolm pretended to look. "No. Nothing. I did put one there, but it must have fallen off. Only it didn't say 'Defy me', it said..."

"Hey, if you're too out of it to respect the chain of command, you're definitely too out of it to play with explosives. So what's it going to be, Malcolm?"

"Sorry, sir," Malcolm replied with a small smile.

"You're still getting a once over from Phlox, before you move an inch. And Travis? I don't know what your problem is. Believe me we will be talking about it later, informally, I hope, for both our sakes. But for now? Get it together. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Travis replied, gruffly, but encouragingly quickly.

"Okay," Trip said, with a relieved sigh. "Good. Together, we can do this. Everybody gets out."

* * *

Lieutenant Hess shook her head. "Estimating an thirty second delay between arming and explosion, and ten seconds to get the call from the source to the transporter room, I'd say we'd get two or three out at most."

"Thirty seconds? You're basing that on the Romulan mine we encountered?"

"Yeah. It won't be longer."

Grimly, Hoshi nodded. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

"Sure," Hess answered tiredly. "Aren't we due for some luck?"

Hoshi had no answer, so with a nod she turned and pondered where to go now. The bridge. She could go to the bridge, but… but there was a message from sickbay that the boy was showing genuine signs of meaningful communication. If there was even a chance that the child knew something that could help the away team… could she live with herself if…

No. She couldn't. And so she found herself back in sickbay, standing over a biobed which held the two people on Enterprise that she wanted to deal with least. The telepathic child and Travis's soon to be ex-girlfriend, who, based on the friendly expression she was shooting Hoshi, had no damn idea how ex she was soon to become.

"This is Hoshi, 'beetsje," Fabrecia said in a warm slightly slurring voice. "She's great at talking to people and she's going to figure out how to talk to you better. So you don't have to bite people..."

Hoshi blinked. "He bites?"

"Only mean people," Fabrecia replied serenly, glanding over Hoshi's shoulder at Alice Harper, who stopped squeemishly applying leaches to her hand for long enough to roll her eyes. "And Hoshi's not mean, ' _beetsje_. She's my friend. She wants to help."

Between the telepathy, the potential biting and Fabrecia's words, Hoshi all but ran for the door. Still, every reason that had compelled her back here still applied, so she drew in a long breath and began. "Hello. Like Fabrecia said, my name is Hoshi. I am the Communications Officer of a Starship called Enterprise. That's where you are. It's my job to find a better way to talk to you. What's your name?"

Hoshi steeled herself for the telepathic assault, forced herself not to block it, however much she wanted to, and sure enough, a series of strange symbols appeared in her mind. "What do those mean? Read them to me…" She heard sounds now, potentially Romulan, but they made no further sense.

"What about the others, the other children?" she asked, confused, hoping to discern a pattern. More symbols followed, and with them a sickening insight. Not names. Serial numbers. They had no names.

"What should we call you?" she asked, no longer certain she was speaking aloud. She heard Harper nearby, engaging a medical scanner, but did not break her focus to look. "We can't call you that. That's a number, not a name."

The picture in her head changed. _Tentou-mushi_. Ladybird. Red and jolly, crawling happily over a leaf, something this child could never have seen. And it was the Dutch word which she heard echoing - _lieveheersbeestje_ \- small creature of a benevolent creator.

And Hoshi's heart broke.

"Fabrecia called you that, didn't she? I like it…"

The child nodded solemnly.

Breath hitching, Hoshi continued. "We have people on the surface, in the Dome. Trying to save the others…."

A thought intruded, insistently. Hoshi's birthday, her family gathered around her.

"…Trying to save your family," she corrected, and was rewarded with another solemn nod. "The people we have down there are part of MY family. Do you know anything which can help them?"

The child tensed. Images followed. Trip - no, Sim- and a small girl Hoshi didn't know - Monette Fortier, the other mind supplied. Hoshi wasn't sure what this meant, but it didn't feel good.

"…please?" she asked, begged. "We are good people. We want to help."

There was a long pause, then another nod. A rush of air and heat filled her head.

"The bomb. We know."

… the sensation changed. An overwhelming sense of death, the Xindi-trench melting into an image of Epsilon Legato.

"…many are already lost. I'm sorry."

…. Others, faceless, abandoning them, _Lieveheersbeestje_ and his brother-twin, hurting them as they clung to the abandoning-others in fear.

"…they left you when they died. Do you know why?"

The swirling images stilled for a long time. Eventually, an image emerged, but Hoshi didn't understand it.

"Mice? They were afraid? Rats, deserting a ship?" Hoshi knew this was wrong, but nothing more followed. She jumped when a hand touched her shoulder.

"Lieutenant? Hoshi? That's enough now."

Feeling slightly dizzy, Hoshi met Harper's concerned eyes.

"It's time to stop, Hoshi. He's had a big day, and your nose is bleeding."

Leaving the boy to Fabrecia's soothing coos, Harper directed Hoshi to Phlox's office. Hoshi took the proffered tissue and held it against her nose, then sipped from the proffered glass of water.

Harper took yet another scan. "Bleeding's stopped, then, good. Your scan looks alright. Must have been a transient rise in blood pressure, I suppose. Let me know if it starts up again, or if you start to feel wonky. And maybe take it easy for a few days. Not too much excitement..."

Hoshi stiffened. "You know don't you?"

Harper frowned. "Know what?" Then a flash of realisation crossed her face. "Oh, no...I didn't mean. That's none of my business."

"So you DO know?"

"Yes, sorry, I do. Travis said something earlier. But it's not my business, and it wasn't what I meant. I just meant, take it easy. Did you get anything? Talking to the lad, I mean..."

Hoshi shrugged, mollified. "I'm not sure. I think so, but it's all a bit muddled. Most of it we knew already."

"Still, he didn't scream at you, or knock you out, or bite you, so that's..."

"Actually there was something," Hoshi recalled, plucking something from the jumble in her hear which she hadn't really noticed before. Something to do with Harper. "Who's Monette Fortier?"

Harper heavily sighed. "She's the reason I'm going to Hell. One of them, anyway."

"Could she have something to do with this?"

"Well, I doubt it. She's been dead near two years and was not quite three when that happened..."

"I didn't mean to pry..."

"It's alright. You had to ask. That sounds like my memory though. Not anything to do with this. Although, maybe you can return the favour. Does the word 'Sim' mean anything to you? It might have something to do with medical records? People keep asking if I've read the medical records... and I mean of course I have... Is there some sort of rumour that I'm a shoddy doctor, or somesuch? Because, actually, I..."

Hoshi ran her fingers across her face in a gesture dramatic enough to stop Harper's chatter.

"... do you feel alright, Hoshi? Are you dizzy?"

"No," Hoshi replied heavily. "Alice, do you want some advice? You obviously want to fit in here, be included. It comes off you in waves. And I get it. Coming into an existing crew is hard. But, if you do want that? To have friends here? Be accepted? If you want that, you need to forget you ever heard the name Sim."

"Sim is a _name_?"

Hoshi stood quickly enough to make her head spin, but she ruthlessly ignored her dizziness. "There's a box. A box with filled stuff from the Expanse. A box CLOSED in the expanse. Sim is in the box, Alice. If you ever want anyone here to like you, DO NOT OPEN THAT BOX."

Harper blinked. "Erm...alright. I... Hoshi, I really think you should sit..."

"I need to talk to Commander T'Pol," Hoshi interrupted sharply. "Tell her what I've learned."

And, with that, Hoshi once again strode out of sickbay.

* * *

It was warmer in the shuttlepod than outside, but Liz couldn't seem to stamp the chill from her bones. Sitting hunched, glaring at the floor in place of glaring at her lover, she knew WHY.

The dread in her bones was not born of the cold, but rather of the sudden certainty that she was sitting by while a tragedy unfolded. That one day she would be called to account. That she would sit in a room and be asked 'but why did you sit by while a traumatised child suffered agony from a bone infection? WHY?'

And she would have no answer.

In her head, over and over, the chained child died. Slowly, agonisingly, succumbed to infection. Wracked with fever, but conscious to the end. Conscious of his would-be rescuers refusing to help, because they had bean-counted an unaware four against an agonised one.

"We should shoot him," she growled out sharply, breaking her resolve not to speak to Phlox, not to pick at the so recently formed scab. She couldn't bring herself to care about the damage she might be doing to their fledgling... whatever it was. Couldn't care about such a thing when her soul grew heavier by the second. "If we aren't prepared to actually treat his suffering, we should at least stun him. Every moment of agony is on us."

Phlox looked at her as if concerned for her sanity. "I cannot understand why you would say such a thing, for i am certain you can't be serious. A phase pistol injury, even a short stun burst, could be lethal to so ill a child, and we would be in no more of a position to provide resuscitation than we are now to provide pain relief. If I was willing to take such a change I would throw the child a hypospray to self-administer. We are doing everything we can."

" We are doing nothing!"

"Nothing is what we are able to do."

Liz glared. "That's a lie. Nothing is what we are choosing to do. We aren't picking the optimal option here... we are picking the one which minimises the risk of iatrogenic injury. We are picking the one which keeps supposedly keeps our hands clean. But it's crap. If that child dies, because we delayed and delayed in service of some potentially imaginary risks of awakening the other four too quickly, then his death is on our conscience, whatever you say."

"I can only disagree. The universe unfolds as it unfolds. I can control only my own actions. I broke no bones, I wired no incendiary device. I stand here with the ethics I brought with me. The ethics honed by a lifetime of service to medicine. I do as those ethics instruct me, and I can in good conscience, do no other."

Liz narrowed her eyes. Her words had taken on a will of its own, howling up from some deep part of her. Some nameless, buried rage. " There's no special morality in choosing NOT to act. It's a choice like any other. And your insistence that we can keep our hands clean here by doing nothing, even if it means a child dies in agony...? It's so alien, inhuman..."

"I'm NOT human," Phlox replied leadenly. "Nor have I any wish to be. And frankly, Elizabeth, I find your insistence, that I should just play God as I see fit- bounding arrogantly into every situation and forcing my will upon it- to be just as alien as you apparently fine me."

"And you dare to say that to me now, yet not call it arrogance? To just insist that you have some greater understanding of the universe, of some greater purpose and our place in it? How is that not arrogant?"

Phlox's answer was quiet. "I know my place in the universe, my purpose in it. I do no harm even if harm should follow from that choice from the actions of others. I do not pretend to know if that is how all ought to act. But I believe it is how doctors should act. Doctors must not harm, because the universe is better when doctors do not harm. And I am a doctor."

There seemed little else to say.


	14. Chapter 14

"I'm fine. Stop fussing."

And, as far as Phlox could tell, Lieutenant Reed was fine. Still, Phlox ruminated over the scanner readings for quite some time before pronouncing him so. A small part of him would have been pleased to find something wrong, and as a consequence, order Reed back to the 'pod. Phlox did not like how reluctant the man had been to withdraw to the corridor to be examined, or the way Reed's eyes seemed magnetically drawn to the room with the child and the bomb. He had an indefinable sense that something destructuve was happening in that room. Something which should be stopped.

But there was nothing to find, and so the disquiet settled within Phlox, hovering near the back of his mind, even as he pronounced Reed fine. Joining his distress over the calamity with Liz, and about the rapidly corroding working relationship between Mayweather and Tucker, the disquiet had ominous company.

With his attention so overtaxed and divided, he almost missed what Mayweather was telling Tucker.

"... and I'm not sure how important it is, really, but Alice says they're transgenic clones."

"Clones?" Commander Tucker's voice was flat.

Mayweather continued almost reluctantly. He was, to Phlox's mind clearly remorseful for his earlier outburst; was probably at a loss to explain it even to himself. Silently, Phlox cursed Harper for apparently paying far better attention to the genomes of her Aenar patient than to the mental wellbeing of junior lieutenants being sent out on away missions.

"... made with those things, you know?" Mayweather was saying, and unaccountably looking at Phlox for help. "You know, like with... you know those things? The larval things?"

It was an odd moment for Phlox. To feel the knife twist before he felt it pierce. Sim. He could not answer Mayweather. He did not have the breath to speak.

"What *things*?" Commander Tucker asked, no longer suppressing his annoyance. Tucker didn't know. He had avoided as much knowledge about Sim as he had been able to. Had almost always walked straight out of rooms where the name was mentioned, whenever Phlox had tried to explain. And lately, it was almost never mentioned at all.

"The...cloning larva thing... like when we...that Phlox used when you," Mayweather stammered, belatedly aware of the dangerous straits in which he had wandered, and that there would be no help coming from Phlox.

"You mean Sim." The words came from an unexpected quarter. From Malcolm Reed, and they came impatiently. He was only half looking at the rest of them.

The news seemed to knock Commander Tucker back a step, to draw his fingers up to claw distraughtly through his hair. Dead children. Clones. Sim. It was enough, more than enough to tear through the weakening veneer of dispassionate commander, to the instincts of the man below. And every one of those instincts had been clamouring the same message for days. "We're getting the hell out of here. Cut those four out of those pod things right now. We're setting that electrolaser and we are getting that kid, and then we are warping the fuck out of here."

Phlox, took a step forward, horrified. He had to try. "Commander..."

"No. I'm sorry Doc, but we are risking every life on Enterprise every second we linger here. You haven't given me a better plan, and there's no time anyway. Cut the pods open and do your best. That's it."

Phlox swallowed. "One at a time, at least. Give the later few the best chance."

"As long as you are quick about it," Tucker replied voice rasping.

Phlox should have left it there. He was better than what he said next, but the memory of Sim was twisting in his heart. "If it's all the same to you Commander. I would prefer that you picked which child is to be the first experimental subject. I have quite enough on my conscience."

Phlox didn't turn toward Mayweather's intake of breath, nor react to Reed's shocked censure that he was out of line. Instead, his gaze stayed fixed on Commander Tucker, on his face, as his eyes narrowed down, closed.

"Fine," Tucker hissed into the silence. "First on the left. Happy? Malcolm, when are you ready?"

"Trip..."

"When, Malcolm?"

"When you are, after a few minutes to set up."

"Then set up and wait for my orders. Travis, go swap places with Liz. Phlox, with me," Tucker snapped before stalking down the corridor without waiting.

Reed left next, giving only an absent nod to Mayweather, but managing a dark, venomous look for Phlox.

"I had to say," Mayweather said softly. "It could have been important. You know... medically..."

Phlox didn't answer.

"...I had to."

* * *

T'Pol raised an eyebrow in slight surprise at the visitor to the Ready Room, whose arrival had pre-empted the message she was even now composing.

"How is the Captain?"

Harper's face clouded slightly. "I'm keeping him in for observation."

"Which means?"

"Which means damned if I know what happened," Harper chucked bitterly. "And I can't find anything specifically wrong, but I have an indefinable sense of foreboding. This may, of course, be entirely irrational, but it may also represent the sum total of a series of small observations made unconsciously that reflect an underlying pattern of genuine wrongness."

T'Pol suppressed a wry quirk of her mouth. "I see, Doctor. May I suggest for the future, though, that you work to improve your recognition of such small unconscious observations. At least to the point where you can articulate them rationally."

"Aye. I'll get right on that. In the meantime though... can I trouble you for a cup of microbiologist?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'd like to borrow a microbiologist," Harper repeated, sitting down. "I have need of one, and I don't have one handy."

"For what do you require a microbiologist?"

"The Aenar lad bit me."

T'Pol pulled herself straighter, noticing herself experiencing the symptoms of mild annoyance. The nature of what might be wearing down her emotional control didn't require further investigation, she had already noticed how her mind kept drifting to thoughts of what might be happening on the surface. How at any moment there could be an explosion there. How that would change her life, irrevocably. "I do not understand. Please be more succinct."

"The Aenar lad bit me and when I cultured the bite I noticed that one of the bacteria in the saliva had multiresistant genes. Now again, I'm no geneticist but I think I've seen these resistance genes before."

"Where?"

"Remember that infected wound I had after getting injured on _Treleishkah_? Different bacteria, but the resistance genes are almost identical. I think we are missing something here."

"It is human nature to detect patterns where none exist."

"Indeed. Which is why I am requesting an expert look at it."

T'Pol sighed. "Agreed. But now is not the time. There has been a message from the away team. Four of the remaining children are currently within status modules of some kind. Dr Phlox requests that you make yourself available in the transporter room with appropriate resuscitative equipment should the extraction have side effects. There is also a small risk the extraction may somehow trigger the explosive device In a short time, you may have your hands full."

"Aye, Commander," Harper replied with a tired nod. "More than enough to occupy my time. I knew I should have been the one to go down there instead of Phlox."

"Because of his superior experience?"

Harper sighed. "Aye, that. And because of the bomb too I guess. Dangerous. Phlox is married. Three times no less. And he has five kids. There's no one to miss me and..."

"Six."

"Sorry, what? He has _six_ kids? Have I forgotten a whole kid? Blimey, but I'm rubbish at toadying if I can't even remember how many kids my boss has..."

T'Pol paused. _Sim_. The correction had been automatic, unthinking. The clarification could not be. "He had a short lived adopted son, whom he may not have mentioned."

Harper exhaled, shaking her head "Remind me to just never open my mouth around here ever again."

"That is unlikely to improve your efficiency, doctor. Please report to the transporter room as requested."

T'Pol sat meditatively once she had gone, her thoughts turning around a long ago kiss and the intricacies around who is remembered.

* * *

"It won't be long now."

The child didn't answer. He appeared miserable, despondent, and had done so ever since that strange flash of memory and Malcolm's subsequent collapse.

"It's alright. I'm not angry."

No answer. There had been a brief desolating burst of something hard to define when Malcolm had first reentered the room, but nothing since.

"Please talk to me. I'm worried about you."

His own words sounded strangely in Malcolm's ears, as if echoing down the years. As if he had heard them somewhere before. But he did not trust the stirring mass of memory also dredged up - could not trust it- so he unrelentingly stamped it down.

"You need a name. That's the problem. I need something to call you."

It was almost unbearably presumptuous, of course. What right had he to give this boy a name? But he could equally no longer bear not having one to use. And yet it was not easy; each name that occurred to him - Ion, Pip, Philoctetes - seemed a vicious invocation of the horrible things that had happened to the poor boy.

"This is impossible. How does anybody name anybody?"

No answer.

"Stephen. There we go, it's Stephen."

Malcolm declared this, thinking he had picked at random, but almost at once his head filled with connotations. Every Stephen he had ever known. Every Stephen of note from history, from fiction. Stephen Daedalus from Portrait, from Ulysses...

"Oh. I don't care. Stephen."

Malcolm insisted. No answer.

Malcolm's head was swimming, and he knew it, so he double checked everything he did. Still silence. He didn't look over much. He didn't dare to. The sight of the cowering boy was somehow unbearable. So he looked only as often as he needed to, to ensure the boy was still conscious, still there.

And what would you do if he wasn't? he wondered. What then? For no reason he could name, he imagined himself purposely stepping onto the pressure plate, or running on maybe. Letting the fiery death below out of its cage. A somehow familiar feeling, a whisper heard at the top of cliffs, on train platforms rushing in front of the oncoming train. What if? What then? What if I...

"Please talk to me. I'm worried about you."

The words, though tainted strangely, are something of an anchor. A reminder. A hollow declaration of just who is in danger here, of who is safe.

 _A lie._

Stephen has been answering all along, he realised suddenly. That burning feeling of isolation, of bitter dread has not been coming from himself at all. It's being thrown at him. Fired upon him. Volley upon volley.

"It's okay," he whispered anyway. "It won't be long now."

* * *

It was in a strange parody of a caesarian birth that the first of the pod children, the one on the left- Trip's left- was extracted.

No alarm sounded as they cut through the pod, there was no reaction at all from the dark wall of senescent wiring. Only silence, and the darkening of the pod as the last of the connections was severed.

The child never moved at all. Never breathed. Tensely, Phlox commed Travis with the order for an emergency transport, and within a minute, the still form dematerialised and Trip, Phlox and Liz sat in silence, waiting for word from Enterprise.

When none came, after ten minutes, twenty, thirty, Liz began to speculate on whether the delay represented good or bad news, but she could induce neither of the others to join her. After further delay, Phlox directed Travis to request an update.

"We received a message from Alice," Travis said, a further ten minutes later.

Trip closed his eyes. "What does it say?"

"I... don't know. It's sort of long given it was sent my Morse Code and it's all in doctor speak. It doesn't sound...good though."

"Read it to me please, Lieutenant Mayweather," Phlox replied curtly.

"Some of these words are... I'll do my best. It says 'have restored circulation and tissue oxygenation to Child B via artifical bypass. Anatomy complicated but accomplished prior to unacceptable acidosis. However, microneuroanatomical scan indicates that, unlike Child A, there is no development of interneurons from Rhombencephalon rostrally, and no cytometabolic capacity for neurotranmittor transmission through RAS to Prosencephalon. Strongly suspect this IWL'. Do you want me to spell any of that, Doc?"

Phlox sighed heavily. "No, thank you Lieutenant. You did admirably. I quite take the meaning."

When Phlox did not elaborate, Trip glanced at Liz for guidance, but her eyes were fixed on Phlox himself. "I'm not happy I was right," Liz whispered softly to the doctor.

"Right about what?" Trip asked. "What does IWL mean?"

Slowly, Phlox cleared his throat. "It means that unlike the clone we met earlier and the one with Lieutenant Reed, that the pod clone we extracted has never been conscious and are incapable of ever being so. Assuming that the other three more closely resemble that one, we have indeed been focusing our rescue efforts towards the wrong patients."

"Oh." The response felt manifestly inadequate, but Trip could think of nothing else to say, could not quite bring himself to think about this too closely. He would have to eventually, of course. But not here. Not in this dark room, filled with death. The very prospect of doing so was untenable.

* * *

The last thing Hoshi needed right now was to face any of the various inhabitants of Sickbay. The message from the surface though, was obviously too critical to pass off to an underling, so after cleaving off the short personalised message from Travis at its conclusion, she marched down there in search of Harper.

Who wasn't immediately apparent.

"ICU," Andy whispered to her quietly, flicking his eyes towards the child snoozing in Fabrecia's arms. "We are trying to keep this one from seeing the other one."

Hoshi nodded grimly. "I take it from these messages I'm relaying that the news with the other one isn't good."

"No. It's not good. There's noone there. There aren't the makings of a functional higher neurological system. No chance of a life."

"Some sort of failure in the cloning process?"

Andy sighed sadly. "Maybe. The neurological system is clearly what whoever did this was trying to modify. But... it might have been on purpose. An experimental control group? Spare parts even..."

"...oh my god.."

"...there's just no way to tell without access to the experimental notes of whatever demons conceived of these mess, and even if we DID have them, I don't think I'D volunteer to read them because..."

"..because, nightmare fuel." Hoshi finished breathily. "Fuck."

"Indeed," Andy finished heavily, them pondered Hoshi, clearly torn between his next question and silence. "Are you holding up okay, Hoshi?"

"Why? Did Alice say something?"

Andy shook his head. "No. Alice's gone quiet actually, which I don't think we've seen before, but I doubt is good. She hasn't said anything about you. I meant, I know that telepaths...telepathic things are a sore spot for you..."

"They are," Hoshi said, a little sharply. "But we don't get the luxury of avoiding our sore spots in this life, do we? Phlox has asked for a specialist neurological scanning package to be sent down so they can figure out if the other kids are like the first one or more..."

Hoshi paused, unwilling to let the word 'husk' or any of the immediately apparent alternatives to pass her lips. A sop to her humanity though it might be, it had been a shitty, terrifying day and it was not over. She would allow herself this line. "...I can't just send a bunch. It will be a nightmare to transmit it down under Treleishkah protocol as it is."

Andy shook his head. "Sorry, Hoshi. You'll need to ask Alice. I don't envy you with the protocols though. It must be like trying to work encased in amber. If only these kids had called for help in any other way..."

"Yeah. But they didn't. So we are stuck with Morse Code and limited beam outs. We'll lose the away team if that bomb goes off, maybe just manage to beam Commander Tucker out if we're lucky. And maybe just cause some kid pressed the wrong button on the transmitter and sent a telepresence wave instead of a standard distress wave."

"We can't break the protocol?"

Hoshi shook her head. "If we do, the Tellarites are gone from the Coalition for sure. The Kreetassans too. And we'll be lucky if that's all. I'm going to talk to Alice. Maybe she'll take pity on me and give me some of her seemingly neverending supply of scotch."

Andy smiled. "How did she get all that stuff on board anyway?"

"No idea. I'd say in the guitar case, except I've seen the guitar. Travis nicked it. If she ever gets bored of surgery, career as a smuggler."

Andy shrugged. "Well she certainly has the family connections..."

Hoshi had no idea what he meant, but nodded to cover her confusion. Her earlier words with Harper ran through her mind regretfully as she walked into the ICU. Time to find out if the woman was a grudge holder.

"Andy says you have family connections in smuggling," she said by way of greeting Harper who was staring resolutely at a wall of scans.

"Aye, I do. Brat of the Scottish underworld, me," Alice said not turning around. From the subtle thickness in her voice, Hoshi suspected her retiscence to turn was due to a certain lacrimal embarrassment, a suspicion increased when Alice did at last turn to face her. The woman did not have the colouring to allow reddened eyes to remain unnoticed. "What can I do for you Hoshi?"

"I need to send Phlox some med scanner software under Treleishkah protocol..." Hoshi began.

Alice frowned "I don't know the first thing about communications."

"You know which packets to send, though. The less data the better... he wants to.."

"He wants to evaluate the remaining pod children for a functioning neurological system?" Harper replied thickly. "Okay. You'll want to send the IMENEUCYTBIO packet first. Phlox should be able to get it done with that. I'll start prepping more cardiopulmonary bypass units."

"Is there any POINT putting them on life support?" Hoshi asked, her own voice growing a little thick even as she directed her gaze firmly away from the inert little figure under discussion.

"Not medically no," Alice answered shortly. "But it'll allow us to get them back to Andoria in more or less the state we found them in. Whether THAT will mean anything to the Aenar, I don't know. That's more your area than mine."

"I'm not really a diplomat," Hoshi pointed out. She found she wasn't sure if bringing these failed children to Andoria, still with as much life as they had ever had, ever could have, would mean something to the Aenar. She wondered if it meant anything to her. "Does it mean something to you?" she asked Harper, curious.

"I'm not sure it matters what I think. This is the sort of decision that's for family. Bree's little lad in there, and the one on the planet count I suppose. Not that they're in a position to... but they were cloned FROM somebody, at least initially," Alice answered thoughtfully. "They may have family of a sort there somewhere..."

Hoshi blinked at a sudden realisation. "Oh, of course. I think I know who, as well. Jhamel's brother. Gareb. We never saw him so I didn't recognise...I didn't put it together."

"Then it sounds like we need to talk to this Jhamel."

"We can't," Hoshi sighed. "The damn Treleishkah protocol. Damn politics."

Alice sighed heavily. "When we can, then. Do we have this Gareb's DNA on file somewhere? Or Jhamel's?"

"I'm not sure. We might have Jhamel's."

Harper nodded. "I'll check."

Hoshi stopped Alice's exit with a tentative grip on her arm. "I'm sorry about what I said before," she whispered, wondering as she said it if it was true.

"Honestly, Hoshi? Today? It barely makes a dent. This is definitely one of those days where only the body count matters, and the rest of it can go pickle in rot gut."

"Still sorry," Hoshi murmured. "I've never really been the _other woman_ before."

"And to hear Travis talk you won't be the 'other' woman for long," Alice replied raising her eyebrows. "I hope that's what you want, by the way. If it's not, you might want to get on that, before Travis starts burning bridges."

"Seems like a stupid conversation when he and the others are in a building that could become a fireball at any moment, doesn't it? Maybe you're right, and only body counts matter today. Still, I shouldn't have taken my embarrassment with myself out on you. I don't know what got into me."

"Aye right? I think I know _what_ got into you."

Hoshi glowered. "I don't know what came over me then," she replied haughtily, before realising a fraction too late that that was worse. "IMENEUCYTBIO, you said?"


	15. Chapter 15

"Malcolm..."

"hmm...?"

"MALCOLM? What the hell happened to your flashlight?"

Somehow, Malcolm noticed the agitation in his friend's voice several full seconds before he realised the cause. The beam from the flashlight Trip was holding was the only illumination in the chamber. He had been sitting in the dark.

"Faulty fuel cell. Discharged," Malcolm said his flat tone belieing that the statement was little more than a wild guess.

"Why didn't you SAY something," Trip asked through gritted teeth.

A certain laconic sarcasm was obviously called for. "Well it's not like he minds, is it? And I, for one, didn't fancy stumbling around in the dark near a pressure plate wired to explosives."

Trip tsked unhappily in response. "Is the laser ready?"

"Of course," Malcolm replied. "It's been ready for hours." With a certain disquiet, he realised this was yet another wild guess. He had no real idea how much time had passed. Maybe you AREN'T fine, something within him whispered. Maybe you need to say...

"Good," Trip nodded shortly. "It's almost time."

"The other kids are out?" Malcolm asked, bothered now by the expression on Trip's face. He hadn't, he realised, been the cause at all. "Are they okay?"

"No. But they were never going to be. They were made wrong."

Oh, Malcolm though. No wonder... "Trip...?" he began hesitantly.

"Don't," Trip answered brittly. "Not here. Not now. Not you."

There seemed little to say, but "Alright. But someone, yes? Later?"

"Electro-laser's aligned and programmed?" Trip asked again, firmly. "Good. Then get to the 'pod with the others."

"No," Malcolm replied, honestly astonished. "I've no desire to join Travis in your bad graces, but, no sir. You can't do this. This is my show."

Trip gave him a long look. "I CAN'T do it? Is it set up or not?"

"It is, but...look I'm the expert here. Is every senior officer on the ship convinced they know how to handle explosives simply because they happen to outrank someone who can? I have this under control. It's all set."

"And I would be more inclined to believe that if you hadn't lost three shades of colour at the prospect of hanging my life on this plan instead of yours. What the hell is going on with you and this kid, Malcolm? Just how badly is he messing with your head? And before you lie to me again, I will remind you just who you are talking to."

"My superior officer?"

Trip sighed and looked at Malcolm. There was something odd in his eyes. Something imploring. "Well, that isn't what I meant. But that too. Listen. If you expect me to just walk out of here and leave you to it, convince me that you've got this."

Malcolm forced his expression into an easy smile. "Turn on the electrolaser. Watch it gradually take over the signal from the transducer. Walk over there, cut the chain, pick up the kid, walk out. Nothing simplier. Everybody gets out, nobody dies."

"And if something goes wrong?"

"Dive for cover."

"And pray?"

"Maybe," Malcolm replied with a chuckle that seemed to generate spontaneously from the gloom itself. "If there's time."

Trip nodded bleakly. "I'll signal you when I'm clear. I swear to god though, if you are lying to me now and you get yourself blown up..."

"...then I'll wish I was in Travis's shoes after all," Malcolm finished flippantly. "Time to go, Trip. We'll be out in a few minutes."

Trip nodded, stood and walked out of the room, the words "..you'd better be," drifting back into the chamber.

"It would kill him not to get the last word in," Malcolm said softly to the silent figure, blind and watchful. "You ready for this kid?"

At last a response. An eery nod.

Then a beeping signal from his communicator indicated that Trip was clear, and without offering the child any further warnings - because what good could that possibly do?- Malcolm switched on the electrolaser.

It was almost a surprise when nothing happened, he hadn't known how sure he was that his life would end with that motion, or shortly after it, until it didn't. Gradually, the electrolaser blocked and replaced the pressure plates transducer signal, eliciting no reaction from the arming mechanism, or any other part of the deadly mechanism lurking below.

Soon there was nothing for it, but to step out onto the plate, something strangely hard to do. Theoretically at least, this should be far less dangerous than what he had just done. "It shouldn't be connected anymore," he said, projecting his voice towards the uncomprehending child, ignoring the subtle quaver he heard in it. "In theory."

The others were waiting for him. He tried to calculate how long they might imagine this would take., how long he could tarry and still emerge with the child at the correct moment, neither incautiously early nor timorously late. To do just as expected. To not _bother_ people.

He didn't want to. It was not the prospect of death, exactly, although he had no taste for that either. He was unaccountably reluctant to touch the cowering child. His skin crawled at the thought of the touch of long, ethereal fingers. He heard Alice Harper's voice gently mocking him – you should see what your amygdalae are doing now!; he saw Hoshi Sato's dark eyes roll. But most of all, he heard himself reproach that every moment he delayed, the child suffered, and that same child could see right into him, knew WHY he paused.

It could go on no longer. He stepped forward.

* * *

So unaccountably certain was Trip that the mission would end in disaster, that at first his eyes were unable to register the sight of Malcolm carrying the last Aenar child out of the dome. He indicated wordlessly to the others and then turned to conceal his bone deep surprise, defiantly pretending that this was the outcome he had expected all along.

Travis was still. Not sullen exactly, but watchful, brooding over the knowledge that he had finally- finally!- clamoured his grievances, and was waiting to learn the cost. There would be no such cost, Trip had already decided, at least not of his causing. It was probably unwise. Chain of command… discipline….etcetera. But… _Fuck it_ , basically.

Of course, Phlox had seen, so no doubt the good burghers of Sickbay would have something to say about it in the end. Whether it would be Phlox dithering over talk therapy or Alice throwing psychotropics at the wall to see what stuck, there was no way to predict. But they would no doubt to something. And Trip would let them and, for better or worse, do nothing himself at all. He tried to catch Travis's eye to convey some of this, at least that there was no humiliating dressing-down imminent, but Travis's expression changed not at all.

Phlox and Liz mechanically prepared to treat the approaching child. Now that the boy was clear of the bomb, that arm could no longer be filed under 'worry about that later', they would be worrying about it now, and it would be quite the worry. It would take, Trip imagined, weeks to clear that sort of infection and months to restore function to the limb, and the lifespan of these cloned children were not measured in months.

However much this occupied the thoughts of doctor and medic, it was clear that both were also casting an eye over the shattering of the amiability between them, their strange magnetic affection. Trip knew, certainly more so than Phlox did, that Phlox's absent trio of wives bothered Liz Cutler more than she let on. For all her protestations of open-mindedness and unconventionality, when Cutler was either in her drunk or her doldrums she would yearn aloud to be found captivating, to occupy someone's full attention. Then, most often, she would speculate bitterly that perhaps that was just not her lot in life, that she was not the type of person who was loved that way. Then, most often, she would fall silent. She wore all of that on her face now. What Phlox thought, Trip could not say.

"Well, _really_!" declaimed an acerbic British voice. "It's not like I was expecting a parade or anything, but some acknowledgement of my continued survival would be nice."

Trip jumped, startled that Malcolm had already covered the distance to the shuttle, only just stopping himself from glancing incredulously out of the window, a folly it would take a while to live down.

"Catch you all napping, did I? Alright for some," Malcolm continued, depositing the child into Cutler's arms with poorly concealed relief. "You alert enough to fly, Travis? Or do I need to handle that as well?"

Travis glanced at Trip just long enough to get confirmation of the order, and then busied himself with preflights. Malcolm muttered theatrically about the extent to which he was underappreciated. Phlox and Liz busied themselves with the child, already sunk into unconsciousness under the generous weight of anaesthetics.

"Sir?" Travis asked hesitantly. "Do you want me to loop over the crash site? The other 'pod? So you can get a look before we decide on a recovery plan?"

Trip sighed heavily. "Well, you've seen it, Travis. What do you think? That bird gonna fly again?"

"No sir, I think it's a loss."

Trip nodded. "I'll take your word for it. Let's just get home."

At this point, Malcolm interrupted his bombastic muttering long enough to point out that they should at least recover or destroy the 'pods key systems. That they were too close to the Romulan Star Empire to leave informative wreckages.

Trip conceded the point, but not without a barb. "Nice of you to volunteer for doubtlessly important task, Lieutenant," he said, allowing his vowels to drag out behind him.

Malcolm scowled darkly but did not manage a retort before Travis spoke.

"Actually sir, I can take care of that for you."

Trip paused, giving Travis a long look, accepting the offer for what it was. "Sure thing Travis," he replied at length, lifting his eyes away from the dome disappearing beneath them. In a few hours the electro-laser's battery would be exhausted and the ugly tomb for the innocent dead would be fittingly lost to a fireball. "Sorted."

* * *

T'Pol stalked briskly towards decon. The long purposeful stride caused her damaged legs more than a little pain but this was a more than fair trade for a faster conveyance there.

She needed to _SEE_ him.

She refused to even berate herself for this little slip in logic. She would contemplate it later. Deliberate. Extract any necessary lesion. But there was no purpose, no wisdom into doing so now.

She needed to see _him_ , and all argument was futile.

When she did, it felt as though it might stop her heart. It burnt, it cooled, it enflamed again. He was safe. Exhausted, haunted, hollow- eyed and _breathing_ , sending her a weary smile which had the faint vestige of a kiss.

It was seconds- _more_ \- before she could collect herself to oversee the medical staff's negotiations over quarantine and logistics, oversee the plans for the stripping and destruction of Shuttlepod Two's remains. Such matters took no more than half of her mind and that was all that she gave them. The rest dwelt on him.

He would be angry when he found out that she had raised the treat condition, would be suspicious that she had done so to try and ensure his evacuation had the expected disaster occurred. He would redden and bristle. Shout and pace. She yearned for it. Yearned to watch the conflagration, yearned to sooth him afterwards. She ached for it, and not only in her heart.

 _Suppress_ _! Seek calm!_ Her training- her heritage- demanded.

 _Burn! Yearn! Melt! Consume!_ Her treacherous self replied. _Entwine and forestall all separation!_

The sound of jazz, the touch of silk. A blue gaze and the taste of salt.

Later, they are together as the candles flicker. Later, they are one.


	16. Chapter 16

Phlox was not prone to spying, but it was difficult not to observe the relationship between Travis Mayweather and Fabrecia Boschmann ending. There were only a few locations out of eye-line and the best three of these were quickly occupied by Alice Harper, Malcolm Reed, and Liz Cutler before Phlox had even been able to divine the reason for Mayweather's visit.

Even if Phlox had managed to get himself out of eye line, it still would have been difficult not to hear it.

Perhaps strangely, Boschmann seemed more upset about the scrapping of Shuttlepod Two than the end of the relationship.

"I always knew I was a rebound thing," she'd sobbed afterwards, to a sympathetic Alice Harper and a Malcolm Reed who appeared to be pondering escaping sickbay by tunneling through a bulkhead with his fingernails. "I knew he wasn't over…. What's her name?"

The demand was made of Lieutenant Reed, who, caught off guard couldn't appear to remember.

Before he managed, Alice's eyes had lit up. "Oh wait, I know this. Um…. Something with birds…..duck pond…Gannet Brooks!"

Lieutenant Reed whirled around. "DUCK POND? That's how your brain works?"

Alice had shrugged. "Brains are weird."

"You used to be a Neurosurgeon!" The Lieutenant replied, his aghast expression unaccountable to Phlox.

Alice, however, had not been noticeably nonplussed. "Seriously, Malcolm. Brains are a couple of pounds of jellied meat. It's a wonder they can do anything, really."

At that point, perhaps feeling that the conversation had wandered off point, Ensign Boschmann's distress had markedly increased. "I lost a 'pod and my boyfriend IN ONE DAY!" she had sobbed rather loudly, settling the other's back to a pattern of awkward reassurances.

Eventually, Lieutenant Reed had lighted upon the idea of trying to cheer Boschmann with the prospect of helping to construct the new Shuttlepod Two. "…We've got enough parts," he had said clapping Boschmann awkwardly on the back. "You should talk to Commander Tucker. I'm sure he'd…"

"After I crashed the last one?" Boschmann sniffed, Tears shimmering in her eyes. "He'd be more likely to let Alice in on the build as me."

"Oh I don't know about that Ensign," Reed replied smoothly. "Alice wouldn't exactly be bringing nearly the same _assets_ along with her request as you would, if you know what I mean…"

"I'm not sure _I_ know what you mean," Alice had interjected, looking to Phlox's eyes rather more annoyed than was easily explainable, although Phlox was glad she asked, because he himself was curious.

It took the Lieutenant so long to produce the required answer ('piloting experience') than Phlox resolved to check the Lieutenant for a concussion once again.

To be on the safe side.

Mostly though, this strange autopsy of Boschmann and Mayweather's relationship turned Phlox's thoughts to his own with Liz Cutler. And whether it could be salvaged.

On balance it seemed easiest just to ask her, which he did as soon as he managed to arrange a suitable amount of privacy – lunch in the messhall.

Unexpectedly, Liz had smiled. "I think we could try. But I think maybe that Andy should be trained up to be the new chief medic. I don't WANT to be a medic, you know. I could have been a doctor if I wanted to, I had the marks."

Phlox had not known this. " And did you consider medicine as a career."

"Oh, of course. And if I hadn't, my parents certainly would have considered it for me. But I followed my heart. And I've done my time, and now I'd like to focus on the career _I_ chose. It's Andy's turn."

Phlox demurred, but agreed. Andy was no Liz, but he was a good enough sort… and was hopefully, even now, supervising the situation in sickbay, because Alice certainly wasn't. Instead, she was draining her, by Phlox's count, fourth coffee of the day from the coffee machine and was still, for reasons surpassing Phlox's understanding, still rolling her eyes at Lieutenant Reed.

"I only said it to cheer her up," Phlox heard Lieutenant Reed say to Alice. "She did just get dumped. Could have been for another woman. Unlikely to have been one who's more attractive than Boschmann, of course."

"Actually, at least judging by your standards, you might be surprised," Alice then muttered into her coffee. "This is not good news for you."

"Sorry, what?"

"Nothing."

Quite unable to follow this conversation, Phlox was not overly disappointed when it moved out of earshot. He was surprised, though, to see Liz shaking her head.

"Now what the hell is going on THERE, then?" his medic - no - his paramour _the exobiologist_ , wondered aloud.

* * *

"You did it then?" Hoshi asked as Travis walked past her, and settled on her bed. He looked a little quiet, and she didn't like to push, but, she needed to know for her own peace of mind.

"Yeah, it's done," Travis replied heavily. "You faced your demons today. Sitting down with telepaths. Least I could do, after that."

Hoshi nodded, stretching out a cautious hand and running it along Travis's shoulders. "They were only cute little traumatised child telepaths. Hardly seems far to call them demons." When Travis arched his back slightly at her touch, she repositioned and began a shoulder massage in earnest.

"Yeah, they are kinda cute, aren't they?" Travis said sadly. "Are they going to be okay? The two that are… the two that are awake, I mean."

Hoshi gently pushed her thumbs into tight muscles on either side of his neck. "I think so. I mean except for that arm on the second one. The one Malcolm calls Stephen. Phlox thinks they should amputate and replace it with an arm from one of the…one of the ones that weren't made right. Alice thinks they should just do their best with the one he's got. I think they're going to let Jhamel make the final call."

"Jhamel? Oh right. Because she's their sister," Travis replied, his voice loosening in step with his shoulders. "Or she their aunt?"

Hoshi shrugged, even though she was behind him, and he couldn't see her. "I've no damn idea how the Aenar will see it. Perhaps she won't consider them anything to do with her at all. But…"

"But she is what they have."

"Yeah."

The silence grew between them. Not uncomfortable, exactly, but still heavy and the weight bothered Hoshi. She wished they were in Travis's quarters and she could reach for the guitar. Strumming a few inept bars was sure to get a reaction.

She had all but decided to climb into Travis's lap and make a stake on passion, when Travis broke the silence himself.

"I did something stupid today, though. I shouted at Trip. I don't even know why, really."

Hoshi frowned, did climb into Travis's lap, but forestalled the rest of her plan for now. "It will be okay. Trip doesn't hold grudges."

"He held a fairly spectacular one against the Xindi."

Hoshi sighed. "That makes my point, not yours. Think of the scale of offense it took to get that one going. And anyway, Malcolm shouts at him all the time."

"Not like this."

"Probably WORSE than whatever you said. Have you heard those two?"

Travis sighed. "You weren't there Hoshi. I don't even know why I did it. I just…"

Hoshi started rubbing his neck, from the front this time, and allowed her hands to wander liberally. "I am sure if he is plotting revenge against anybody, it would be Terra Prime. Not you. And Captain Archer has your back, I bet even with Trip. He said he saw something in you. You told me. Now, let's think about more pleasant things."

Travis was _very obviously_ half-persuaded, but yet he paused, uncertain. "Is it seemly, though, Hosh? I mean, I realised we already…but I only just broke up with her but…"

Hoshi raised her eyebrows. "Have I ever said or done _anything_ , Mr Mayweather, to make you think that I am _seemly_? Because if so, I apologise _most profusely_ , but you must dissuade yourself of the notion immediately."

That, and a deep kiss, decided it.

"One of these candles is scented," he says, jokes. "Something smells powerful odd in here."

To T'Pol, plenty of things smell odd, but she has become used to them. "That's the incense," she says playing her part.

"I'm not incensed, I'm just saying," he replies lazily.

Puns are often tedious, usually so in a second language and _always_ so to Vulcans.

She counters his flippancy with sincerity. "Are you alright?"

He glances at her, seemingly causally. "I'm with you."

T'Pol raised an eyebrow. "I meant more generally than just now."

"So did I," he replies, still lightly, still not quite looking at her.

The room is still haunted. Perhaps will always be. Perhaps should always be.

"And I am with you."

* * *

When the door slides open it does so surprisingly soon after he rang given the hour. And Alice does not look surprised.

"You meant Hoshi before," Malcolm said.

"Aye. Some brave soul actually gossiped in your presence did they?"

Malcolm stepped inside. "Not on purpose."

Alice chuckled wryly. "That makes more sense. I was sure we didn't have anyone that lion-hearted. Or someone that terminally unwise. You alright, then?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"

"Do you want a drink? I can't drink, because sickbay's full of tragedy again. Oh, and I've got the Captain sleeping off some fairly thorough sedation in his quarters."

Malcolm found himself nodding, as Alice held up a glass tumbler. "Why did you sedate the Captain again?"

"It's just easier when he's sedated, isn't it?" Alice replied lightly, while pouring. "So I staged a little coup. Who hasn't?"

" _Mutiny_. Not coup d'état. This is a _ship_. The word you are looking for is _mutiny_."

"Aye, that's it, Mutiny. Cheers. And I'm a medical officer, I can stage all the mutinies I like."

"You mean _Phlox_ can."

"Phlox put me in charge of mutinies. I get on with the MACOs better."

"The MACOs all hate you."

Alice smiled, sitting down on her bed. "Aye. They hate Phlox more, though."

Malcolm considered Fabrecia's empty bed, but ultimately sat on the room's single chair. "Seriously though, is the Captain alright?"

Alice sighed, leaning back. "He'll be fit for duty tomorrow."

Malcolm's eyes narrowed. "That's not what I asked."

"That's what I can answer," Alice replied in a tone that brooked no argument. "Are YOU alright?"

Malcolm eyed his glass, already empty, and stilled the request for another which leapt unbidden to his lips. "About what you said before…"

Alice pulled herself straight again. "I say a lot of daft things…"

"About brains being weird? Eyewitness testimony is unreliable, I know that. Memory is… memories are fungible, changeable. Even without unsocialised, telepathic urchins who…" He trailed off, staring at the empty glass.

"Malcolm, what's…"

"I saw something…"

Alice leaned forward a little, waiting for him to continue. She looked unsure about what to do when he didn't. "Saw what?" she prodded eventually.

"Nothing. It doesn't matter." He stood up. "Thank you for the, for the scotch. Still won't stop me throwing you in the brig, when I figure out how you smuggled it all on board though. Captain will be fit for duty tomorrow, you said? That's good to know. That's why I came. It's late. Goodnight."

"I think it qualifies as _early_ , now, not late," Alice answered uneasily, standing as well. She opened her mouth, hesitated, then closed it again. Then, in a tumble, "Ye don't have to leave, ye know."

Malcolm was not certain what was causing the strange tightness in his chest, and he was too tired to ponder it. Still, years of practice meant that, even tired, the tightness didn't sound in his voice. "It's late. I'll see you tomorrow. Breakfast."

Alice smiled. " _Today_."

"Yes. Of course."

* * *

Lifting the _Treleishkah Protocol_ even now that the communications quarantine period had been observed was likely to prove a nightmare. Overall, Jon was delighted to be able to leave the bulk of it to Hoshi, and surprisingly, the volunteering Travis.

Still, even with their help with the bulk, there was still the mass of paperwork for which only the Captain would do. Jon was surprisingly well rested. The sedation Alice provided had been rather overzealous for Phlox's taste, if the Denobulan's grumblings this morning was to be believed, but they had certainly done the job of keeping Sim out of his nightmares, and getting him a good night sleep.

Phlox – both doctors, in fact- were still making noises about some apparently errant heart rhythm observed at one point or another, but there was no sign of it now. "I guess I'm not a young man any more, Doc," Archer had opined, once declared fit for duty, gracious in victory. Phlox had responded with grumbling, and Alice had made some ribald observation or another, apparently completely unembarrassed by her blatant eavesdropping. The important thing though, was that he had been cleared for duty with little more than vague treats of follow up tests.

Upon presented with the paperwork required to resume outbound communication however, he almost pleaded infirmity and ran back to Sickbay. Faster than light paperwork.

 _"Sato to Ready Room."_

Jon blinked. "What is it Hoshi?"

 _"I have Jhamel over subspace for you."_

"So not only have the Andorian's accepted the lifting of the protocols, but somebody has managed to get a transmitter up to the Aenar compound? Already?" Not for the first time, Jon found himself wondering if Hoshi was some sort of wizard.

There was a short pause before Hoshi replied. _"Actually, sir, I contacted Shran immediately after the protocols were suspended, and Jhamel just happened to be there."_

"That was lucky," Jon replied, glad there was no need to suppress his facial expression from its only audience. The discussion had no cheese, so Porthos had no interest.

 _"I'll put her through, sir."_

The discussion went surprisingly well. After the drone ship tragedy, Jon should have had more faith in Jhamel's ability to accept the shocking with equanimity. Shran, on the other hand, sputtered so dramatically that after a certain point it became too ridiculous to continue pretending he was not listening to every word from just outside of the camera angle. Once he formally joined the discussion it got considerably more animated, and considerably more death curses were laid upon the Romulans, but ultimately it remained productive.

"So the Aenar _will_ take them?" Jon confirmed at the end of it, hoping the Universal Translator did not transmit the palpable relief in his voice. The Aenar children had been noticeably larger this morning than yesterday, and the prospect of them living out the remainder of their short lives on Enterprise was not to be born. _He_ could not bear it. "Lissan will allow it? My doctors are muttering about various enzymatic treatments, but in all likelihood it will only be a matter of a few weeks until the end of their lifecycle."

"That only makes the time more important," Jhamel responded calmly, while Shran brought more loud curses down on Romulus, and its surrounding systems for good measure. "Lissan shall be reasoned with. The two that live will live with me, either in the Aenar compound or without, and the four than do not shall be granted the final customs of my people. I will ensure this comes to pass, Captain. Further diplomacy from you shall not be required."

Jon could have sworn that Jhamel's typically serene smile twitched into something cheekier at this last observation. Judging from Shran's nakedly delighted smirk, the Andorian apparently thought so as well. "I'll need to transfer this call down to our sickbay," Jon continued, unruffled. "My CMO needs to speak with you. We can't be at Andoria for several days even at maximum warp. There are medical decisions which can't wait."

Jhamel nodded, and Archer transferred the call. By the time he walked down to sickbay, Jhamel and Shran's conversation with Phlox was already in full swing. As expected the bulk of the conversation centred around the badly infected arm of the second Aenar, the one Malcolm had for some utterly bizarre reason named Stephen.

In fact, to Archer's great surprise, Malcolm was in sickbay now. He was not paying any obvious attention to the desperately ill, three quarters unconscious child he had rescued. Instead, he had annexed Harper's desk, and was working there on tactical reports, his posture somehow clearly conveying that there was _absolutely nothing unusual_ about the fact that he was working there.

Harper herself was standing nearby, sipping coffee and flicking her attention between observing various monitors, following Phlox's conversation with Jhamel, and pointedly ignoring the spitballs that Fabrecia Boschmann and the first Aenar were periodically flicking at her.

Archer approached, taking care to stay out of the line of fire, and tipped his head questioningly towards Malcolm.

"No idea," Harper answered, loudly enough for Malcolm to hear but not loudly enough to interfere with either Phlox's conversations or Fabrecia and 'Beetsje's giggles. "He's being weird." Malcolm offered no visible reaction.

"Do you think this arm transplant will go ahead?" Archer asked Harper.

Harper nodded a little uncomfortably, "Sounds like it, from what Jhamel and Phlox are saying."

"Will you help if it goes ahead?" Jon asked, more curious than anything. He knew better than to directly intercede in the internecine schisms in sickbay. "You don't seem pleased by the idea."

"My objections aren't medical," Harper replied shortly. "And yes, I'll help, if it goes ahead. Peripheral nerve surgery is one of the few things I'm more practiced at than Phlox, and on the time scales these kids are living in, even a few days difference in recovery is significant. So, yes. If it happens, I'll do what I can to make it count…"

Jon raised an eyebrow. "But?"

"But, I'd like to ask you something…"

Jon nodded. "I'd give you permission to speak freely, but there seems no point as you've never needed it before…"

To his surprise, Alice didn't smile. "I'm told…I'm told there's a box. A metaphorical box. A box with the name 'Sim' written on it, and with medical records and a missing Lyssarian Desert Larva inside. I'm told that I _should not_ open this box. And I would like you to look me in the eye and tell me I _needn't_. That there's no ongoing injustice, no cover-up, no conspiracy of silence. Nothing that I'd need to act upon. And, I think you are, for all your faults, an honourable man, and I think that Phlox is an honourable man and an honourable doctor. So if you tell me now that I don't need to open that box, I won't, but I would like you to tell me."

Jon paused. Sim's existence, his purpose was not a secret, had never been, could never be. But the exact circumstances of his death, the coercion, the impossibility of his survival if the surgery took place, the slight but real possibility of his survival if it hadn't? Those things were secrets of sorts, all of them from Trip, and some of them even from Phlox. The coercion might say secret, dead men tell no tales after all. But flimsy story they'd erected that they'd expected the donation to be survivable, would fall apart the moment Harper, former promising neurosurgeon, looked at the scans. And there was the additional problem of how Phlox had faked Trip's medical records to hide the whole affair from future doctors in the first place. The story that the neural tissue had been harvested from a brain dead crewman Fuller would fall apart the moment she realised that she had never seen Trip administered any anti-rejection therapy or noticed that Fullers date of death in his medical records did not match the one in his service records, the one given to his family. Phlox had already mentioned that Harper was vaguely bemused at how successful the transplant had been.

"No conspiracy. No injustice. Nothing you need to do anything about. Best let it go." The smile was forced and the pause had been too long.

"I see," Harper replied, her face a mask. "Good to know."

A sudden flurry from Phlox indicated that the call was over. Jhamel had approved the arm transplant and Phlox and Harper launched into a cavalcade of medical talk regarding the selection of a donor even as Jon moved to Phlox's desk to diplomatically conclude the call.

After trading the requisite pleasantries with Jhamel and unpleasantries with Shran, Jon approached Boschmann and 'Beetsje, still launching unacknowledged spit-balls at Harper. Boschmann was apparently well medicated, because the approach of her Captain did nothing to quell her enthusiasm for the task. 'Beetsje on the other hand, did stop at his approach, looking warily in the direction of Jon's approach.

"We've contacted your… your aunt," he began cautiously , considering summoning Hoshi. "She's very nice. She's helping us decide how to take care of your brother and you are going to go to live with her now." It seemed wrong to be delivering such momentous news so casually, but Jon supposed the words didn't matter so much. The child was plucking the information straight from his mind after all. Jon wondered if it would make any sense, if the concept of 'Aunt' could have any meaning to him.

"Aunt, is family," Boschmann said suddenly, prompted by nothing obvious to Jon. "Someone to take care of you. I'm thinking about my Aunt now. Do you see her? Do you understand?"

There was something so unearthly about the nod that followed. A perfectly fluid movement pausing at neither the top nor bottom, too slow, and repeated for too long. But its intention was clear.

"Good," Jon said, already unconsciously wiping his hands on the legs of his pants. Something, his conscious perhaps, pricked him though. It was not enough. "I'm sorry about what happened to you. Why you were made. How you were treated. It was wrong. I've read Hoshi's – remember Hoshi?- I've read her report, and it says that she thinks you were an experiment. She said you plucked imagery of a laboratory animal out of her mind. I want you to know that… we don't _treat_ people like that. The rest of your life won't be like that. You are going to good people. You are going _home_."

He'd expected no response, or maybe another of those strange nods, but instead the child began to shake his head – no – in much the same manner. Archer was about to make further reassurances when he was distracted by a powerful image of white laboratory mice in a cage. Jon recognised it, them, as subjects in a psychology experiment at his high-school. Several of the students had protested fervently against the use of the animals. Jon had been one of them. Distracted by the detail in the image of the now long dead mice it took Jon a moment to reply.

"Laboratory animals," he said uncertainly. "For experiments you were…."

The head shaking began again, and this time, the child pointed towards his own chest with an exaggerated gesture of his long pale finger. Jon did not understand, until the movement changed, and Jon's breath caught. Slowly, the orientation of the finger turned until it was pointed at Jon's chest and the head shaking became a nod.

The mice in his head changed. It became Mr Crampon, the gimlet-eyed teacher, dangling a thrashing mouse by the tail. "How will they act?" the Crampon of Jon's memory intoned. "What will they do?"

"Us," Jon breathed. "The experiment was on us. This cloning program was abandoned and the Romulans left you there and turned on the beacon to see what we would do. To study _us_."

The room was silent, its every conscious inhabitant but one staring at Jon in consternation and that one was nodding slowly. The voice of Memory-Crampon sounded again in his head. "There is no good science, no bad science. Just science. Just the search for truth."

The image changed again. A detonation in the desert, from an old movie reel.

And Jon knew there would soon be a war.

 **End of Part Two.**


End file.
